At the hackathon, developers bet on HarmonyOS.

Source: Geek Park

Written by: Moonshot

In the past few years, HarmonyOS has completed a shift.

It has emerged from the labs of major manufacturers to become a new blue ocean choice for developers.

The logic behind it is straightforward. The mobile internet market was already saturated, and everyone was fighting for a share within the existing user base. But Analysys pointed out in a report at the end of last year that, within the HarmonyOS ecosystem, there are still large unmet demand gaps that remain unfilled.

Currently, devices running HarmonyOS 5 and HarmonyOS 6 have exceeded 50 million units, supported by 10 million registered developers. For many developers, this represents a new starting point for product development and expression within an ecosystem that has yet to be fully defined.

A new developer stage is taking shape, and this bottom-up flow was amplified recently at the Xiaohongshu Hackathon Finals.

Over 48 hours, hundreds of developers completed a sprint from idea to demo within the same time window. The challenge was open, and the technical approach was completely free, making it more like a real-world “choice test.”

In different teams and directions, some developers coincidentally focused their projects on HarmonyOS.

Geeks are the most perceptive group, their sensitivity to toolchains, efficiency, and opportunities often outpaces the market.

When time is compressed to the limit, the path becomes crucial.

And HarmonyOS just happens to provide such a path.

01 When the system becomes the foundation, creative implementation is no longer limited

The essence of a hackathon is to push engineering development capabilities to the extreme.

In this 48-hour battle, geeks open their eyes to coding and close them to fixing bugs. Under such high pressure, developers fear two hard obstacles: one is a high development threshold, causing ideas to falter midway; the other is a demo that, despite great effort, appears dull and leaves judges unmoved.

On this unofficial arena, geeks are increasingly leaning toward HarmonyOS. Why?

Because HarmonyOS offers a set of highly encapsulated low-level interfaces, akin to an immediately usable weapon library. Developers can treat system capabilities as ready-made toolkits, helping to offset the time pressure of extreme development.

Want to embed large models into applications? Using HarmonyOS’s built-in system-level AI capabilities, calling interfaces is extremely simple, and generative logic can be up and running in half a day.

As for the highly homogeneous interaction experiences, HarmonyOS’s 3D spatial technology directly elevates visuals from 2D to 3D, creating a crushing advantage.

Coupled with its built-in privacy and security mechanisms, it naturally provides a credibility endorsement for projects.

With this toolkit, looking at the two award-winning works on site, it’s clear how HarmonyOS’s underlying tech stack translates into product certainty.

The “Hey! Star” team, which won the “Special Unit for Finding Developers” award, delivered a hardcore project attempting to reconstruct space infrastructure usage rights.

The team, composed of a space materials PhD, a low-level system geek, a hardware entrepreneur, and a cross-disciplinary creator, gathered at Xiaohongshu’s arena. In 48 hours, based on the HarmonyOS ecosystem, they crafted a prototype of a “Personal Satellite Operating System.”

They 3D printed a satellite model with a reflective mechanism, and used HarmonyOS to build two control platforms for personal satellites. One was a dedicated app based on HarmonyOS, demonstrating direct control of the satellite via a mobile interface.

The other was the development of Xiao Yi Agent, which allows natural language interaction to control the satellite with a single sentence.

Peeling back the romantic exterior, the satellite project is a “stress test” of HarmonyOS’s low-level interfaces.

In 48 hours, creating a satellite control platform, the most challenging part wasn’t adjusting satellite data, but how to smoothly operate the complex 3D satellite model on a phone.

Typically, such high-precision spatial models cause phones to overheat and drop frames, but the “Hey! Star” team found that HarmonyOS’s ArkGraphics 3D framework can directly handle model calculations, making the complex spatial model lightweight and aligning with the official encouragement of “3D spatialization.”

Whether commands are issued from the phone screen or via Xiao Yi voice, they can penetrate the network to precisely respond to the remote satellite model, thanks to HarmonyOS’s cross-device distributed soft bus technology.

This project demonstrates to the outside world that as long as the system foundation is solid, space computing power can become a basic infrastructure on personal desktops.

If the “Hey! Star” team is challenging the physical limits of software collaboration, then the third-place hardware track winner, “TRI.ME Blown Away,” has achieved complex soft-hardware ecosystem integration.

The team includes a humanoid robot competition champion, a consumer electronics expert, and a tech developer. They shifted their focus from space to the human daily routine at the washbasin.

“TRI.ME Blown Away” discovered that the ten minutes or so spent daily on hair drying and brushing teeth are the last “attention vacuum” zone in modern life that remains undigitized. So they chose to use a robotic arm to pick up a hairdryer, automatically tracking head position for intervention, and embedded a smart panel in the bathroom scene to deliver audio-visual entertainment.

The biggest challenge of this project was “hardware fragmentation.” They had to handle the motion protocols of the robotic arm, power regulation of the hairdryer, and streaming media on the screen—all within 48 hours if done traditionally.

But under the HarmonyOS architecture, hardware is virtualized into system modules. Calling the external robotic arm is as simple as accessing the phone’s built-in camera.

This “hardware as plugin” transformation allowed the team to skip tedious infrastructure setup and focus entirely on user intent recognition and device interaction logic.

Right after the demo on stage, Liu Jingkang, founder of Insta360, directly extended a verbal cooperation invitation.

With HarmonyOS’s rapid development, MVP (minimum viable product) validation with minimal loss has become a reality in this bathroom model.

Besides the big winners under the spotlight, many more intuitive and hardcore ideas are budding within these 48 hours.

For example, the “Temporal Persona” team, focused on AI conversational intelligence, created an app where celebrities at different life stages (like the impulsive 20s and the mature 50s) can sit together across time and debate.

This multi-role, multi-round interaction demands high responsiveness and scheduling from the system. The team chose not to build from scratch but to develop directly on HarmonyOS’s ArkTS and ArkUI native architecture, offloading multi-device adaptation and UI rendering to the system, enabling the same codebase to run on both phones and tablets.

After multiple AI characters finish their discussion, the system automatically generates structured summaries. The team can then use Share Kit to directly transfer the results—users can “grab” on the screen or transfer wirelessly to another device.

While this project isn’t perfect, it already proves that with sufficiently smooth underlying capabilities, complex interaction structures can be implemented within 48 hours.

In these extreme time windows, the “certainty” of actually building a product is what geeks most desire as their ultimate card.

02 From “System” to “Platform”: The Structural Dividend of the HarmonyOS Ecosystem

In the past, operating system logic was often about big companies setting the stage, developers adapting, with a clear separation between platform and applications. In this old architecture, the system was just a pure low-level code library. Developers finished coding and then had to dive into deep waters—buying traffic, competing for exposure with giants.

But in the context of HarmonyOS, this layered separation is beginning to blur.

It not only provides capabilities but also pre-organizes scenarios, compressing key steps like cross-device interaction, AI, and distribution into shorter paths. Developers no longer need to assemble system capabilities from scratch but can directly enter the “creation” phase, shifting the focus from “support” to “how short the implementation path is.”

This difference determines that its appeal to developers isn’t just about technology but about a set of structural dividends.

The most fundamental layer is the technical dividend brought by architectural restructuring.

In the past two years, large models have flooded the scene. But for most small and medium teams and independent developers, training models themselves is prohibitively expensive in compute power. Calling external APIs turns the application into a shell without core logic.

HarmonyOS’s solution is “one system, one ecosystem.” Here, AI is no longer an add-on but integrated directly into the OS core.

This change is immediately reflected in the development experience. Take Xiao Yi’s open platform as an example: developers don’t need to build complex AI interaction logic from scratch. They just connect application capabilities into the system’s intent framework, which can then be invoked via voice, search, or recommendations.

Huawei’s “Tian Gong Plan” announced last year is also a straightforward statement. With 1 billion yuan dedicated to AI innovation, it signals that the government is bearing the cost of AI experimentation for developers.

This decentralization of technology leads to the second dividend: efficiency.

Survival is the top priority for all startups. Today, with device fragmentation, supporting phones, tablets, car systems, and smartwatches simultaneously can crush small teams.

HarmonyOS’s pragmatic solution is to unify development, debugging, and performance optimization within a single toolchain via DevEco Studio, turning the long-held slogan “write once, deploy across multiple devices” into reality.

A single codebase, with the system automatically handling different screen sizes and hardware features, allows small teams to focus on refining user experience rather than pixel-perfect adaptation.

But that’s not enough. Technology and efficiency only ensure the product is built; whether it can make money depends on the third, most critical layer: opportunity dividends.

This is the real underlying motivation for geeks competing on the field. China’s mobile internet user base is approaching 1.3 billion, and growth is plateauing.

For developers, the real challenge isn’t “are there users” but “are there opportunities.”

The HarmonyOS ecosystem is at a different stage now. In some niche areas like social messaging, sports and culture, and maternal and child services, user demographics are still rapidly evolving, giving developers early opportunities to shape product forms.

For small and medium developers traditionally weaker in the mobile ecosystem, HarmonyOS offers systemic multi-dimensional support.

Billion-level “Developer Incentive Plans” and “Starlight Projects” have been launched. The government is lowering entry barriers with real funding, injecting vitality into the ecosystem’s foundation.

More importantly, distribution mechanisms are changing.

Traditional markets rank by volume, with the front page dominated by giants. HarmonyOS, however, promotes “editorial recommendations” to give “small and beautiful” apps more exposure.

Last year’s HDC Hackathon saw student teams developing navigation tools for the visually impaired and startups digitizing traditional Chinese medicine, both gaining unexpectedly high attention.

Such projects rarely get similar exposure in traditional app stores, but in the HarmonyOS ecosystem narrative, they are seen as “worthy of being seen” innovations.

When funding, traffic, and stage are tilted toward ordinary developers, the old hierarchy is broken.

This also changes developer behavior: some start exploring more niche directions, others develop more experimental products, because they realize these efforts might be amplified.

This explains the emergence of those “bold” projects at Xiaohongshu Hackathon. Whether it’s the romantic idea of treating satellites as personal hosts or the hardcore use of robotic arms to control bathrooms, geeks are keenly aware that when new capabilities are unlocked and old allocation methods are broken, opportunities appear.

This is also the signal from the 2026 HarmonyOS Innovation Competition: the most hardcore system-level capabilities are open to all developers.

Whoever turns these capabilities into products first will have a better chance to shape the next wave of applications.

03 From Extreme Sprint to Long-term Progress

Running logic in 48 hours is just the starting point; transforming a demo into a fully used product by tens of thousands requires longer-term iteration.

Many mature HarmonyOS apps started as rough prototypes in hackathons, evolving through multiple rounds of official support and refinement into products used by millions.

The 48 hours of Xiaohongshu Hackathon are over, but the creative lifecycle has just begun.

For developers eager to push their ideas into the market, they need a higher tolerance for failure and more resource-intensive incubation.

The “2026 HarmonyOS Innovation Competition” has taken on this role.

Compared to the short sprint of hackathons, this is more like a long-term incubator. Developers can take more time to expand demos into fully functional products, focusing on security, privacy, full-scenario collaboration, AI, and 3D spatialization to refine complete experiences.

The incentives are also more pragmatic: over 680,000 yuan in prize pools and individual awards up to 150,000 yuan serve as “seed funding” for independent developers.

More importantly, subsequent resources include deep mentorship from official technical experts and top exposure at the 2026 HDC conference. This is the ticket for individual projects to leap from geek circles into mainstream markets.

If we extend the timeline further, it’s clear that the HarmonyOS ecosystem has moved beyond its initial stage. Whether anyone is willing to enter this platform is no longer the question.

The more pressing challenge is how to create truly competitive experiences within this system. This is the signal the innovation competition is sending.

As the tech stack continues to open and tools improve, HarmonyOS is becoming a reliable business and technical foundation, reshaping the logic of geek choices. More and more developers are starting to see HarmonyOS as a starting point for their projects.

This change won’t be fully amplified in a single competition, but will gradually accumulate through repeated attempts.

When more products are truly launched, these early choices will become part of the results.