The Apple Watch has spent its entire life locked to the iPhone. Huawei just shipped a way around that, and it is smaller and stranger than the headlines make it sound.
The app is called HarmonyOS Interconnect (Watch), and it sits in China's App Store as a standalone download for the watch itself. Install it on an Apple Watch, scan a QR code with a compatible Huawei phone, and your Huawei calls, texts and notification summaries start showing up on your wrist. The watch can also ring so you can find it, and the phone can be made to ring from the watch.
That is the whole feature list. It is also the first time a major phone maker outside Apple has put its own notifications on an Apple Watch without an iPhone in the middle. Sort of. The iPhone is still there. It just is not running the show.
What the app actually does
According to the app's listing, it does two things. It forwards notifications from the Huawei phone to the watch, and it helps you locate either device.
The call forwarding is alerts only. You can see that someone is calling. You cannot answer on the watch. Messages arrive as notification summaries, not as a thread you can read and reply to. A reasonable way to think about it is that the watch becomes a display for your Huawei phone rather than a companion to it.
The device finding is limited too. It uses Huawei's NearLink and Bluetooth connection to make the other device ring at full volume. It does not use Apple's Find My network, so there is no map, no last known location, and no direction arrow. If the watch is out of Bluetooth range, this does not help you.
There is one piece of good news buried in the setup notes. Apple lets you install apps directly on the watch from the App Store, so once the watch is set up you can add this app without touching the Watch app on an iPhone.
The catch nobody leads with
You still need an iPhone to set the watch up in the first place.
Apple's pairing flow has not changed. A new Apple Watch pairs to an iPhone, and until it does, the Huawei app has nothing to connect to. So the target user here is not someone who wants to leave the iPhone behind. It is someone who already owns an iPhone and an Apple Watch and has added a Huawei phone to their pocket, most likely in China where Huawei's newest hardware competes hard against Apple.
Health data stays put as well. Workouts, heart rate and sleep from the watch keep going to the iPhone and Apple Health. Nothing about your training reaches the Huawei phone.
The requirement list is narrow. The watch needs watchOS 10.0 or later. The phone needs HarmonyOS 7.0.0.109 or later, which rules out Huawei's international models that ship with the Android-based EMUI. The compatible phone list is short: the Mate 90 series, the Mate XT 2 tri-fold and the Pura X View. Owning a different HarmonyOS 7 phone is not enough.
Availability is the other wall. When coverage checked, the Watch app was not in the US, UK, Hong Kong or Kenyan App Stores, and Huawei's FAQ for the related iPhone interconnection app says the phone-to-phone feature is not supported overseas for now. This is a China-first release, and it may stay that way.
Huawei is behind vivo on this
If Huawei's version feels thin, that is because a rival got there first with more.
vivo's international Origin Health Connect app does the obvious things Huawei skipped. It forwards calls, lets you control the phone's camera and music from the watch, and sends steps, heart rate, sleep and workout data back to vivo's own fitness app. vivo has also had a Chinese version of its watch app in the App Store since May 2025, so Huawei is arriving late to a category its competitor already defined.
Huawei's support material does mention incoming-call alerts reaching the watch, but an alert is not a phone call you can take. For anyone hoping this closes the gap between an Apple Watch and a non-Apple phone, it does not.
Why this matters beyond Huawei
The direction of travel is what makes this worth watching, even in the state it shipped in.
Apple Watch is one of the strongest reasons to stay on an iPhone. Anything that weakens that lock-in is interesting, and phone makers have started building for the Apple Watch precisely because their customers own one. Huawei has been here before. It released a tool in late 2025 for swapping files with iPads, iPhones and Macs, and this app extends the same idea to the device people wear.
It also cuts against the usual complaint in the other direction. Garmin and other watch makers have spent years asking Apple to open up iPhone features that only the Apple Watch gets. A little of that has moved in the EU, where the Digital Markets Act forced changes including background sync and Live Activities, as we covered in our look at Garmin and iPhone Live Activities in the EU. Huawei came from the opposite end, and only needed App Store approval to put its own bridge on the watch.
Set a low bar for version two, though. Early users report dropped connections and messages that only appear when the app is opened, and the app's own rating sits near the bottom of the scale. That is a normal first-version problem, and it is also the reason this is a curiosity today rather than a reason to change how you pair your watch.
The bottom line
Huawei has proved you can push a non-Apple phone's notifications onto an Apple Watch, and it did it with a free app rather than a phone sale. But you need an iPhone for setup, one of three specific Huawei phones, and you get alerts instead of replies. Health and workout data never cross over.
If you own an Apple Watch Series 11 or an Apple Watch Ultra 3 outside China, nothing changes for you this month. Inside China, on a Mate 90, it is a real, if limited, convenience. Our review of the Huawei Watch GT Runner 2 shows what Huawei does when it builds the watch itself, and it is a lot more than this app does. For the moment, an Apple Watch still assumes an iPhone, and Huawei's bridge assumes you never really left.
Sources: the HarmonyOS Interconnect (Watch) listing in China's App Store (version 1.0.1, developer Thunder Software Technology, dated October 1, 2026) and Huawei's support and FAQ documentation for its interconnection apps, which list the compatible phones, the HarmonyOS requirement and the message-forwarding and device-finding functions; independent coverage from tech-ish (October 12, 2026), Pandaily and Huawei Central. Note that most English-language write-ups of this app trace to the same App Store listing, so the functional detail above rests on that primary listing plus Huawei's own documentation rather than on multiple independent test results.
