A Study of AI-Oriented Development for HarmonyOS Applications

With the deep integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, the era of ubiquitous intelligence imposes higher demands on the intelligence level of application development. Huaweis HarmonyOS, as a distributed operating system designed for all-scenario deployment, provides a unique platform for constructing intelligent IoT applications. However, current research on application development for HarmonyOS mainly focuses on conventional IoT tasks, and a systematic development paradigm oriented toward AI functionality integration is still lacking. To address this gap, this paper first systematically reviews the current status and challenges of IoT and HarmonyOS application development, highlighting the insufficiencies in supporting intelligent scenarios. Secondly, it proposes an AI-oriented development paradigm for HarmonyOS applications, covering the complete workflow from environment configuration, parallel development, distributed debugging, to application deployment. This paradigm also provides an in-depth analysis of the unique advantages formed by integrating HarmonyOSs built-in AI modulessuch as computer vision and natural language processingwith distributed technologies. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm, two case studies were constructed: a Smart Temperature and Humidity Monitoring and Early Warning System and an AI Visual Cleaning Robot. These examples demonstrate how intelligent applications with edge-side inference and cross-device collaboration capabilities can be efficiently developed on the HarmonyOS platform. The results indicate that the proposed development paradigm offers practical guidance, enabling developers to fully leverage HarmonyOSs AI capabilities and create high-performance, intelligent applications for ubiquitous IoT scenarios.