Huawei Puts the Mate 90 on Sale Hours After Unveiling It, as HarmonyOS Passes 90 Million Devices
The flagship went on sale two hours into its National Day launch event, while a separate milestone put Huawei's HarmonyOS on track for 100 million devices by year-end.
Huawei put its new flagship on sale at 12:08 on October 1, barely two hours after the launch event began — a "release and immediate sale" schedule the company previewed on Weibo with a launch post on its device account. The Mate 90 series arrived on the first morning of the National Day holiday, when attention was otherwise fixed on flag-raising ceremonies and traffic reports.
The design is the talking point this generation. Hands-on posts ahead of the keynote flagged the "floating gem ring" camera surround and what early reviewers keep calling a younger look for a line that historically sold to executives; the same posts claim step-ups in performance, imaging, communications and durability. One Weibo reviewer who had handled a unit wrote that the redesign "changes my impression of the Mate series at a stroke", while another reported that first impressions from the floor were "uniformly high".
The launch also landed on a software milestone. A widely shared post on Zhihu, citing the tech outlet Fast Technology, put the installed base of HarmonyOS — counted across its fifth, sixth and seventh generations — past 90 million devices, with daily gains of roughly 177,000 units. At that pace the system crosses 100 million devices around the end of the year, a threshold the post treats as a matter of when, not whether.
The timing set the two dueling ecosystems on the same news cycle. Days earlier, Apple's iPhone 18 pre-sale crashed the company's own Chinese store, with chatbots becoming the checkout of choice. A Zhihu question asking which of September's parade of flagships is actually worth upgrading for had already framed the season as a contest; the Mate 90's same-day availability is Huawei's answer to it.
There is a longer arc beneath the sales figures. A popular Weibo post circulating this week revisits the 2016 Mate 9 — a phone built when Huawei was still promising eighteen months without slowdown — and finds it still running smoothly on modern HarmonyOS, an argument for why the company's owners replace their phones less often than Apple's. Whether the Mate 90 converts curiosity into the kind of queue the iPhone once commanded will be visible by the end of the holiday week. The software milestone will not wait for it: at the current rate, HarmonyOS's hundred-millionth device ships sometime around New Year.