Unveiling Harmony at a Huawei developer conference in the southern city of Dongguan on Friday, Richard Yu, the head of the company’s consumer business, said that the new operating system was designed to work not only on mobile phones but on smart watches and other connected home devices as well.

Indeed, the first Huawei products to run on Harmony will not be smartphones but “smart screens” that the company plans to release this year. Mr. Yu said Harmony would gradually be incorporated into the company’s other smart devices over the next three years. But there is no immediate plan, he said, to release Harmony-based phones.

Huawei’s preference is to continue using Android on its handsets, Mr. Yu said. But he added that there was no technical reason Harmony could not also be used to power a phone.

“If we are not able to use the Android operating system, then we can activate Harmony anytime,” he said.

At Friday’s developer conference, which was held in a basketball stadium, Mr. Yu described Harmony’s technical features and capabilities, to occasional bursts of raucous applause. But Huawei did not make any devices running the new operating system available for testing.