A few hours before Huawei officially unveiled HarmonyOS 7.0 at HDC 2026, the company quietly dropped OpenHarmony 7.0 Beta 1 — a pre-release build that had first surfaced three weeks earlier and has now been formally released as a public testing framework for device makers and developers.
OpenHarmony serves as the open-source foundation that device manufacturers and software developers use to build custom operating systems for smartphones, tablets, and IoT devices. This Beta 1 release brings a range of new capabilities spanning ArkUI, ArkWeb, ArkTS, camera management, media handling, and more.
On the UI and application side, the update introduces dynamic layout containers, global reuse of custom components, and a redesigned window management system. Notification handling gets more flexibility with support for custom notification ringtones, while granular per-app controls have also been expanded. ArkWeb receives optimized web page control capabilities and a kernel upgrade to Chromium 144, along with URL whitelist control support.
The full list of changes is detailed below.
Application Framework
- The “Last Exit Information” field in the Ability section now supports retrieving the exit reason.
- The AbilityStage context includes a new launchElement field, informing the application which Ability is being loaded when onCreate is called in AbilityStage — enabling dynamic resource loading.
- The AbilityStage component manager adds a callback for when the first Ability is about to be created, plus a callback for when a process starts from an application snapshot.
- Added support for retrieving the application name using a specified package name and clone index.
- C API now supports managing ModularObjectExtensionAbility, including querying information and handling connection and disconnection.
Media
- The C API adds a callback function for privacy protection settings, used to respond to privacy events triggered during screenshots and screen recordings.
- The C API now supports retrieving multi-screen recording capability information and selecting multiple screens for recording via DisplayID.
Camera Management
- Added support for creating deferred preview output objects that can be added to data streams in place of standard preview outputs, with Surface configuration support for deferred preview.
- New professional camera capabilities added to photo and video modes, covering flash, optical image stabilization, exposure, manual focus, ISO sensitivity, and physical aperture settings.
Background Task Management
- The countdown reminder instance object now includes repeatInterval and repeatCount parameters.
Basic Communication
- Added support for obtaining Wi-Fi connection information via C API.
- Added playback status broadcast support for A2DP and SCO broadcast events.
Network Management
- TLS now supports certificate chain verification, with the ability to handle up to 1,000 certificates by passing in an array.
Content Embedding Service
- A newly added Content Embed service provides a framework for cross-application document embedding and collaborative editing, offering encapsulated client and server development interfaces to simplify the implementation of cross-app document collaboration.
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Luiza Mosneagu is Reviews Editor at Droid Tools. A psychologist by training and tech writer by passion, she has tested over 60 Android devices since 2020 - always for a minimum of two weeks before writing a word. Her focus is camera quality, everyday usability, and cutting through marketing claims to tell you what a device is actually like to live with.
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