vivo unveiled OriginOS 7 today, 16 September 2026, at its developer conference (VDC 2026) in the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center. It is the seventh version of the system that ships on vivo and iQOO phones and the first one built on Android 17. Alongside it the company showed BlueOS 4, its platform for watches, smart home gear and other small devices, and talked again about “AgentOS”, its idea of a system where the assistant carries out tasks instead of just answering.
OriginOS is the new entry we are adding to the directory today, so a bit of context is due. It was born in November 2020 as vivo’s China-only skin, while the rest of the world got Funtouch OS, and it stayed that way for five years. With OriginOS 6, in October 2025, vivo retired Funtouch and took OriginOS to every market, Europe included. This is therefore the first major version announced knowing in advance that it will reach the phones sold outside China.
Liquid Glass, this year’s buzzword among Android skins
The change you will notice first is visual. vivo calls the new look “light and shadow”: translucent materials, a see-through colour effect that works pixel by pixel, ripples when you press buttons and shadows that shift as you drag things around the screen. Users can pick one of three intensities, Real, Natural and Soft, so if the glass gets in your way you can tone it down.
The lock screen gets Liquid Themes, with an animation that reacts to how you tilt the phone, and the Flash Card theme, which turns a photo into a card of sorts. There is also a sticker library that works system-wide rather than inside a single app.
If the name sounds familiar, it should. Apple introduced its own Liquid Glass with iOS 26 a year ago and this autumn every Chinese Android skin ships something along those lines; OPPO is presenting ColorOS 17 in the same weeks with the same pitch. Making the glass look good without eating the battery is exactly what vivo tries to argue with the next point.
Blue River and Virtual GPU 4.0: vivo’s own numbers
Underneath the interface sits a graphics engine vivo says it has rebuilt, Blue River, with a layer called Virtual GPU 4.0. The figures are the company’s and should be read as such:
| Area | Improvement over OriginOS 6 (according to vivo) |
|---|---|
| Graphics rendering | 14% faster |
| App start-up | up to 12% faster |
| Page switching | 19% faster response |
| Power use during animations | around 20% less |
On top of that comes revised memory management, a scheduler vivo describes as “unfair” (it favours what the user is touching over whatever runs in the background) and Storage Compression 2.0, which squeezes what you are not using and promises to free up to 20 GB on a 256 GB phone. That last figure is easy to check once the stable build lands, and it will be one of the first things we look at.
Atomic Workbench: foldable multitasking on a regular phone
vivo already shipped the Atomic Workbench on its foldables, a way of working with several floating windows that looks a lot like Stage Manager on macOS and iPadOS. With OriginOS 7 it comes down to ordinary candybar phones. On a six-and-a-bit-inch screen its usefulness is debatable, but it is the same idea the whole industry is chasing: the phone as one system in your pocket, on a foldable and plugged into a monitor.
Blue Heart: the assistant that chains apps together
The AI side is called Blue Heart and the assistant, in China, Xiao V (sold abroad as Jovi). According to what vivo has been releasing over the past weeks, it holds multi-turn conversations without losing the thread, runs tasks that span several apps and understands dialects and vague commands, with a recognition rate the company puts at 97%. The pre-event teasers also showed an on-screen “AI pet”, more gadget than anything else.
This is where the AgentOS talk fits: vivo wants the assistant to be the one that opens the booking app, fills in the form and shows it to you to confirm. It is the same promise Apple makes with Siri in iOS 27, Google with Gemini on Android and Huawei with HarmonyOS, and in every case we have yet to see how much of it works outside the demo and with apps that are not the manufacturer’s own.
What about the Android underneath
Keep in mind what OriginOS is: a closed layer on top of Android, which in turn is a Linux. vivo does not publish the skin’s source code, so the free part is the AOSP underneath and the kernel, whose sources the manufacturer has to release under the GPL. Everything described above, the graphics engine, the compression, the assistant, is proprietary, just as in ColorOS, HyperOS or One UI.
There are also two OriginOS 7s. The Chinese build, the one unveiled today, carries no Google services and integrates vivo’s own; the global one, coming later, does ship Google Play and usually drops features that depend on local services. When vivo publishes the final list for Europe we will have to check what gets lost along the way.
Timeline and devices
What is known of the schedule as of today:
- 30 July 2026: vivo opened recruitment in China for the internal beta, 500 slots per model. Among the first devices were the vivo X300 Pro, the vivo X Fold6 and the iQOO 15.
- 16 September: official unveiling. The Chinese beta is under way.
- 21 September: launch of the vivo X500 series, the first to ship with OriginOS 7 out of the box.
- October (expected): first stable builds for recent flagships, following the pace of previous years.
- First half of 2027: mid-range and budget phones, in waves.
As for models, the list doing the rounds, which vivo has not fully confirmed, includes the X and X Fold series (X Fold6, X Fold5, X Fold3 Pro, X300, X200, X100), the V range (V70 down to V40), the T5 and T4, the newer Y models, and on the iQOO side the 15, 13 and 12, the Neo 11 Ultra, 11, 10 and 9 Pro, and the Z11S, Z11 and Z10. The update policy varies by tier: on flagships vivo promises up to five major Android versions, on budget phones considerably fewer.
If you own a vivo or iQOO bought in Europe, the sensible thing is to expect nothing before late autumn and not to flash the Chinese beta: it targets Chinese hardware and usually comes without Google services. The OriginOS entry will pick up the dates as vivo firms them up.
Sources: official OriginOS page on vivo.com; OriginOS 7 entry on Baidu Baike; vivo to unveil Android 17-based OriginOS 7 on September 16, GSMArena; OriginOS 7 launch date confirmed, official teasers reveal major design upgrades, Gizmochina; OriginOS 7 Gets a Major Reveal at vivo VDC 2026, Techgenyz; OriginOS 7 Eligible Devices, Beebom; vivo officially unveils OriginOS 6, here’s the device roadmap, GSMArena.