Image provided by Huawei on June 2, 2021 shows the online launch ceremony of its operating system HarmonyOS 2 for smartphones in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong Province. (Huawei/Handout via Xinhua)

Industry insiders say the success of the system hinges largely on whether it can attract, within a short window of time, enough hardware and software developers to embrace the ecosystem by HarmonyOS.

For Wang Chenglu, president of the software department of Huawei's Consumer Business Group, the short-term market share goal for HarmonyOS's ecosystem is 16 percent.

"Sixteen percent is a threshold for an operating system's ecosystem to develop prosperously. It is a threshold that Huawei must pass," Wang said.

Chinese industries, including home appliances, sports and fitness, travel, entertainment, and education, have welcomed the launch of HarmonyOS.

In May, Midea Group, a leading Chinese home appliances maker, announced that it would roll out some 200 new products running on HarmonyOS by the end of this year.

Originally conceived as a system for IoT devices, the application of HarmonyOS on smartphones was almost an afterthought for Huawei.

The idea of developing an operating system was first proposed in 2012 by Wang, who was then working at Huawei's software institute. It was floated as a technical solution to catalyze the company's software-developing potential.

With the fast growth of Huawei's customer business, the project gained increasing internal support, and the first version of the operating system was developed in May 2017.

After the U.S. adopted a string of restrictive measures on Huawei in 2019, citing national security concerns, the project took on more urgency. In August 2019, Huawei launched HarmonyOS on IoT devices.