By NUPIAO News
On August 30, NetEase Cloud Music posted a red vinyl record poster with the HarmonyOS logo on its official Weibo account, captioned “September, a good time for music. Stay tuned.” — a clear signal that the HarmonyOS native version is finally on its way.
The next day, I reached out to NetEase Cloud Music’s customer service for more details. Their response: “Regarding the HarmonyOS version of NetEase Cloud Music, we recommend keeping an eye on our official channels for the internal beta release timeline. Any updates will be announced through official channels as soon as they’re available.” Based on that, it looks like an internal beta is what we’ll see first, with the full public rollout still waiting for the official green light.
Behind this announcement lies a painfully long wait — over 900 days for HarmonyOS users of NetEase Cloud Music. Ever since pure-blood HarmonyOS started rolling out to Beta users in January 2024, other major music apps like QQ Music, Kugou Music, and Qishui Music have already completed and launched their HarmonyOS native versions, filling most of the gaps in the music streaming space. But NetEase Cloud Music? Still missing in action on the phone side. The only native version they managed to ship was for HarmonyOS-powered car systems, leaving phone users high and dry.
On Huawei’s AppGallery wishlist, requests for a HarmonyOS native NetEase Cloud Music have piled up to over 200,000 — consistently ranking among the top items on the most-wanted list.
During all this time without a native app, HarmonyOS device owners have had to rely on a virtual machine solution called Zhiyitong to run the Android version of NetEase Cloud Music. But let’s be honest — that workaround has been a mess. Background processes get killed by the system, playback controls don’t work on the lock screen, track switching stutters, playlists fail to sync properly, and battery drain gets noticeably worse. Paying Black Vinyl members have been stuck paying for premium features while getting anything but a smooth, stable listening experience.
Facing these issues, some loyal NetEase Cloud Music users have chosen to grit their teeth and put up with the bugs. Others bounce back and forth between multiple music apps. And quite a few long-time users have simply jumped ship to Huawei Music or other competing platforms.
According to Huawei’s disclosures, the OpenHarmony community now boasts over 13,000 contributors and 650+ ecosystem partners, with more than 2,000 products built on it. Meanwhile, commercial adoption is accelerating — devices running HarmonyOS 6 have already surpassed 80 million, and projections suggest that number will break 100 million by Q4 this year.
On the app side, there are now over 100,000 HarmonyOS native apps, with more than 400,000 available on HarmonyOS phones. On the device side, OpenHarmony-powered devices have exceeded 1.3 billion worldwide.
Industry insiders I’ve spoken with say NetEase Cloud Music’s slow adaptation is the result of several practical factors stacking up.
Building a native HarmonyOS app means a massive rewrite of the product using the ArkTS language — a heavy lift in terms of manpower, R&D, and testing costs. That’s no small expense for any company. At the same time, the virtual machine compatibility solution provided a basic fallback, which objectively reduced the urgency of phone-side adaptation. So NetEase redirected some R&D resources to prioritize the car-system HarmonyOS version instead, pushing phone adaptation to the back burner.
Back in November last year, when NetEase Cloud Music still hadn’t adapted to HarmonyOS, social media was buzzing with speculation — including rumors that the company was outright “refusing to adapt.” In response, NetEase Cloud Music publicly stated: “Our product and technical teams are working around the clock to further optimize and refine the app, ensuring that once it’s launched, users will enjoy a more stable, smoother, and better experience.”
Despite that clarification, the actual progress remained painfully slow — which naturally fueled even more frustration among users.
For NetEase Cloud Music itself, this delay has come with real market consequences. The exodus of HarmonyOS device users has directly hurt its user base. In the competitive landscape, NetEase Cloud Music’s monthly active users have already been overtaken by Qishui Music.
According to QuestMobile’s online music app industry report released in March, Qishui Music hit 156 million monthly active users, up 78% year-over-year, surpassing NetEase Cloud Music’s 147 million for the first time to claim third place in the industry. Back in 2021, at its peak, NetEase Cloud Music boasted 184 million MAU. Now, Qishui Music — powered by Douyin’s massive traffic ecosystem and a low-price strategy of free listening with ads — has knocked NetEase Cloud Music out of the top three mainstream music apps in just four years.
Plenty of once-devoted community users, fed up with the HarmonyOS experience issues, have been forced to migrate to other music platforms. Their playlists, comments, favorites — years of community data — all become sunk costs when switching platforms.
After NetEase Cloud Music announced the HarmonyOS adaptation, user reactions have been sharply divided. Some who’ve waited years are hoping the native version will finally eliminate all those virtual machine headaches and bring back a stable listening experience. Others, though, say they’ve already bought memberships on other music platforms — and if the new version isn’t genuinely good, they see no reason to spend more money on yet another subscription.
Still, the arrival of NetEase Cloud Music’s HarmonyOS version carries symbolic weight for proving how mature China’s homegrown operating system ecosystem has become. Once the adaptation is complete, NetEase Cloud Music is expected to support HarmonyOS features like atomic cards, super-device music transfer, and native system playback controls.
For NetEase Cloud Music, though, this adaptation feels less like a fresh start and more like overdue homework. What it has to confront isn’t just rewriting code — it’s figuring out how to win back the HarmonyOS users it’s already lost.
