Huawei's rotating chairman Erik Xu, told the gathered throngs at  its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen: "We're going to graft hard to get the HarmonyOS app ecosystem sorted in China first, then we'll start nudging it out to the rest of the world bit by bit."

The company plans to shift apps to HarmonyOS and is nudging other app developers to start coding for the platform.

"In China, Huawei smartphone users are glued to about 5,000 apps for 99 per cent of their time. So, we will spend 2024 shifting these apps to HarmonyOS first as part of our mission to bring the OS and app ecosystem together. We're also giving other apps a nudge to jump to HarmonyOS," Xu mentioned.

He said that over 4,000 apps are already being moved over, and they're having a chinwag with developers about the remaining 1,000 or so.

 "It's a massive job, but we've got a fair bit of backing from the industry and loads of app developers," he claimed.

"Once we've got these first 5,000 Android apps – and thousands of others – up and running on HarmonyOS, we'll have a proper HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu added.

He reckons they could have up to a million apps in the future.

Counterpoint Research reckons HarmonyOS had a four per cent slice of the global market share in the last quarter of 2023, and it's bagged over 16 per cent market share in China. That puts it in third place for mobile OS by handset sales, just behind Android and iOS.

Whether HarmonyOS will catch on outside China is a bit of a question mark, with the current sanctions and the US/EU-China relations being a bit frosty.