At the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2026) held on June 15, Zhu Dongdong, President of Huawei’s Terminal Tablet and PC Product Line, directly addressed the long-standing online accusations that HarmonyOS is a “shell for Android.” He stated that HarmonyOS V1.0 has passed the National Security Reliability Assessment conducted by the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center and achieved the highest level — Level II certification, becoming the first domestic desktop operating system to reach this level. Currently, no other desktop or server operating system has obtained the same level of certification. Zhu claimed that if HarmonyOS were a shell for Android, it would not have been able to obtain this certificate, and bluntly stated this proves that HarmonyOS, from its kernel to its upper layers, is entirely self-developed by Huawei.
The aforementioned certification results were announced by the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center in January of this year and are listed in the first batch of the 2026 Security and Reliability Assessment list. Level II is the highest level in this assessment system, and the HarmonyOS desktop OS is also the first to break through Level I. By citing this certification on-site at HDC, Huawei, for the first time in an official setting, used it as direct evidence to refute external skepticism, pushing the debate over the self-developed kernel from verbal disputes into a new phase of proactively providing institutional endorsements.