According to Huawei, over 4 million developers have signed on to build on the Harmony platform and that there are already 134,000 apps using HMS Core. HMS Core itself keeps evolving and yesterday’s event saw the launch of version 6.0 with extended support for Huawei’s cloud services.

To increase those numbers the company launched the Huawei HMS Global Application Innovation Competition 2021 that invites developers to create innovative new apps based around HMS Core. Since the name is quite a mouthful, in short, it is known as Apps UP.

Developers from all around the world can participate. The monetary prize pool is $1 million, but Huawei will offer practical awards too, including marketing support, cloud resources, incentives for using HMS Core’s payment system and more.

The tens of thousands of apps are already available and can be enjoyed by over 10 million users – Huawei already claims that HarmonyOS is the third-largest mobile ecosystem in the world. That may or may not be true, depending on how you count mobile ecosystems (e.g. KaiOS was on 100 million devices a couple of years ago).

However, this is only staged one of the HarmonyOS 2.0 rollouts to older models, which will extend into next year. And, of course, there are the devices that come with Harmony out of the box. What is more, the Huawei Watch 3 and 3 Pro are on sale in China as of today, alongside the MatePad Pro 12.6 (2021).