How WorkBuddy Built a HarmonyOS Desktop App in Just 4 Weeks Using AI

WorkBuddy’s team released the first third‑party AI agent application for HarmonyOS desktop in just four weeks, using WorkBuddy itself as the primary development tool – a concrete example of "using WorkBuddy to develop WorkBuddy".

The transition from the mobile version to a desktop productivity tool introduced unique challenges: ensuring stable invocation of tens of thousands of built‑in skills, guaranteeing secure local file operations, and providing a seamless hand‑off experience from phone to PC. These problems could not be solved by simply copying code from other platforms.

At the time, the HarmonyOS desktop market lacked any existing intelligent agents, leaving the team without reference implementations. Nevertheless, they proceeded because users demanded a secure, stable office assistant and the team felt the need to fill the gap.

To accelerate research, the team fed HarmonyOS developer documentation, API references, and community discussions into WorkBuddy. The AI quickly extracted key information, compared alternatives, and produced technology‑selection recommendations, turning a day‑long manual review into a matter of minutes.

During coding, WorkBuddy assisted with UI component calls and desktop‑specific file‑system interactions. When errors occurred, developers pasted logs into the assistant, which identified root causes within minutes and suggested concrete fixes.

For testing, WorkBuddy generated test cases, simulated user scenarios, and automatically compared actual outcomes with expected results, dramatically shortening the testing cycle across multiple OS versions and device models.

When runtime compatibility issues arose, the team supplied crash logs, device details, and reproduction steps to WorkBuddy. The assistant rapidly narrowed the problem scope and even proposed remediation strategies.

The overall outcome was a complete product launch—from initial development to market availability—in only four weeks.

This experience illustrates a new development paradigm: AI is no longer a peripheral helper but a collaborative partner that participates in every stage, from research and coding to testing and deployment.

Beyond the HarmonyOS case, the article describes a scenario where a solo cross‑border e‑commerce operator used WorkBuddy to build a personal operations dashboard: automatically ingesting platform data, consolidating it into a unified view, monitoring anomalies, and generating daily reports—all from a single natural‑language request.

WorkBuddy’s core capabilities that enabled these outcomes are:

Autonomous task decomposition: understands complex instructions and breaks them into executable multi‑step workflows.

Local + cloud engine: with user permission, can read and manipulate local files while also invoking online resources and tools.

Multimodal input: accepts text, voice, images, and file imports, with one‑click integration of Tencent Docs and knowledge bases.

Skills ecosystem: compatible with over 22,000 skill plugins, covering 12 industries and more than 140 expert consultants.

Cross‑device collaboration: tasks can be dispatched from mobile and executed on desktop, enabling seamless workflow continuity.

The article draws two signals for developers:

AI is flattening the entry barrier to new ecosystems; developers can rely on AI to become “HarmonyOS experts” during the development process rather than mastering the platform beforehand.

AI tools themselves are the most effective development instruments, as demonstrated by WorkBuddy’s self‑development.

According to Analysys, WorkBuddy’s monthly visits have surpassed 20 million, making it the leading desktop AI productivity platform in China.

For developers considering the HarmonyOS ecosystem, the four‑week timeline serves as a reference point: AI can help you learn the platform, turn ideas into products without coding expertise, and execute tasks directly on HarmonyOS desktop.