Huawei's Smartwatches Will Control Your Lights and Speakers After the HarmonyOS 7 Update

A quiet but revealing update to the Huawei Smart Life app landed Tuesday night — version 17.0.3.312 — and buried inside is a feature that tells you more about where HarmonyOS 7 is heading than any keynote slide.

The app, which controls Huawei’s growing ecosystem of smart home devices, now has a “multi-device management” section that includes smartwatches for the first time. Tap into it, and you get a preview of what happens when a Huawei smartwatch runs HarmonyOS 7: the watch becomes a remote control for your home.

The core feature is straightforward. After upgrading to HarmonyOS 7.x, supported watches can display and toggle smart home devices directly from the wrist — lights, smart plugs, air conditioner companions, speakers, and bulbs. The interface also supports one-tap execution of preset scenes, so a single press can dim the lights, turn on a speaker, and set the thermostat in one go.

Huawei’s own description is refreshingly direct: “Enjoy wrist-based home control. No more tedious steps.”

The feature works on the WATCH Ultimate series and the standard WATCH lineup. User reports suggest the initial device support includes smart plugs, AC companion units, smart bulbs, and desk lamps — the usual suspects, but the list will almost certainly grow as more third-party manufacturers integrate with Huawei’s Smart Life platform.

This is not a surprise move. Huawei has been building toward deeper device cross-control since the early days of HarmonyOS, which was designed from the ground up as a distributed operating system — meaning any device in the ecosystem can theoretically serve as a control surface for any other. The watch was an obvious candidate. It’s the device most people wear all day, and its screen is always accessible with a wrist flick.

Wrist-based home control is not new — Apple has offered it for years through the Home app on watchOS — but Huawei’s implementation ties directly into its proprietary Smart Life ecosystem, which is one of the largest consumer IoT platforms in China. The difference is reach: Huawei’s ecosystem spans appliances, lighting, security cameras, and even HVAC equipment from dozens of third-party brands, all unified under a single app.

HarmonyOS 7 was officially unveiled at Huawei’s HDC 2026 developer conference on June 12, with developer beta testing opening the same day. Huawei terminal BG CEO He Gang confirmed during the keynote that the public release is scheduled for the fall. This smartwatch home control feature appears to be one of the more practical additions arriving with the new OS version — not a headline-grabber, but the kind of refinement that makes an ecosystem sticky.

Whether the feature will extend to non-Huawei smart home devices through Matter or other cross-platform standards remains unclear. For now, it works with what’s already connected to your Smart Life account — which, if you’re already in Huawei’s orbit, is probably most of the devices in your home.