Is the Doubao AI mobile phone a trailblazer in dismantling traffic barriers, or a disruptor stirring up industry chaos?

Authored by: Sun Yuhao

Edited by: Chen Xiaoxiao

The Doubao AI mobile phone made waves at launch but quickly faced pushback from major apps!

The battle for ecosystem dominance and interest alignment has commenced.

On December 1, the Doubao AI mobile phone, a joint venture between ByteDance and ZTE, hit the market, instantly igniting a firestorm of online discussions.

This phone, the first to deeply integrate an AI assistant at the operating system level, boasts features like cross-app automation and real-time visual comprehension. On its debut day, all available stock was snapped up immediately. On secondary market platforms like Xianyu, prices soared from the original 3,499 yuan to as high as 12,900 yuan. Some sellers even offered daily rental rates of 1,600 yuan, reflecting a surge in market enthusiasm.

The immediate sell-out underscores a strong market demand, with consumers eagerly anticipating this phone equipped with the Doubao AI assistant and innovative interaction features, hinting at immense market potential. The inflated prices in the secondary market and rental services highlight the premium value added by product scarcity.

This not only generates direct sales revenue for ByteDance and ZTE but also signals high market acceptance of AI mobile phones as a burgeoning product category. If the current "buzz" can be sustained, it has the potential to carve out a niche in the smartphone market and drive substantial profit growth for the involved companies.

However, ZTE's stock price, which is in partnership with Doubao, surged to its daily limit on the 1st but then dropped by 1.73% and 4.84% on the 2nd and 3rd, respectively.

The erratic fluctuations in ZTE's stock price mirror the complex market reactions to the Doubao collaboration.

The initial surge on the first day reflects market optimism, believing that the partnership would bring new business opportunities and technological advancements to ZTE, thereby driving up its stock price.

The subsequent declines over the next two days could be attributed to the market, after initial excitement, considering factors such as potential technological hurdles, competitive market pressures, and uncertainties in the profit model, leading to a loss of investor confidence and a drop in the stock price.

This indicates that while the capital market eagerly pursues potential opportunities with emerging collaboration projects, it also maintains a cautious stance, adjusting investment strategies based on real-world conditions.

The Doubao mobile phone delivered a near-futuristic experience to its initial batch of users. Some users shared their experiences of acing the Bilibili official membership qualifying exam using the phone, which swiftly identified and automatically selected correct answers for questions involving intricate anime details.

Tech enthusiasts tested that a simple command like "Help me edit the video" allowed the AI to automatically identify and roughly edit the footage.

However, just as the excitement was peaking, WeChat led the charge in restricting its login permissions, followed by multiple apps from the Alibaba ecosystem and several mobile banking apps. Users manually operating the phone also triggered "abnormal login environment" warnings, while games like Honor of Kings prohibited AI assistant intervention, forcing users offline otherwise.

Behind this contrasting scenario lies a complex web of commercial logic and industry ecosystem dynamics.

Existing Competitors: Top App Vendors Launch Strong Counterattacks.

Top app vendors hold pivotal positions in the internet ecosystem, boasting massive user bases and mature business models. Taking platforms like Taobao and Meituan as examples, they rely on traditional traffic logic systems established through user app openings, page browsing, and ad clicks for profitability, with user retention time and ad placements as core KPIs.

The Doubao AI mobile phone enables users to directly complete operations like ordering food and shopping without browsing the homepage or watching ads, directly impacting their traditional traffic logic.

For instance, when a user says, "Help me book a flight to Beijing," they might have previously compared prices across multiple platforms before choosing. Now, the Doubao mobile phone might directly guide them to a specific partner, significantly weakening the traffic entry value, ad monetization capabilities, and ecosystem control of top app vendors, thereby damaging their core interests and prompting them to take resistance measures.

Exploring potential competitors, besides ByteDance, mainstream mobile phone manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and Honor have already ventured into the AI agent arena.

Huawei's Xiaoyi agent pioneered the commercialization of the A2A (Agent to Agent) mechanism, enabling cross-app collaboration with other application agents. Honor's YOYO agent can automatically complete coffee ordering processes through voice interactions and can also "automatically collect coupons and compare prices across platforms." Vivo and OPPO have bolstered their on-device AI computing power and scenario adaptation capabilities. Large model startup Zhipu has also launched an on-device AI agent, "AutoGLM," and collaborated with Samsung to bring it to the Galaxy S25 series.

These potential competitors may draw inspiration from Doubao's experience to launch similar products or features, intensifying market competition.

Substitutes: Traditional Interaction Methods vs. AI Interaction.

Traditional mobile phone interactions primarily rely on "icon clicking," where users manually open apps to complete tasks.

The Doubao AI mobile phone attempts to usher in a new era of "intent recognition," where users can complete complex operations through voice commands.

However, traditional methods are deeply ingrained, and user habits are challenging to change in the short term. Moreover, in scenarios requiring precision, manual clicking may be more accurate and convenient. For example, when editing documents, manual input and format adjustments may be more efficient than voice commands. Therefore, for AI mobile phone interaction methods to fully replace traditional ones, they need to overcome hurdles such as user habits and technological limitations.

Supplier Bargaining: The Tug-of-War Between Mobile Phone Manufacturers and AI Companies.

For mobile phone manufacturers, AI technology is a crucial means to enhance competitiveness. Top mobile phone manufacturers like Huawei and Xiaomi, with their self-contained ecosystems and robust technological capabilities, may opt not to adopt third-party AI solutions but instead develop their own AI assistants to maintain the highest system scheduling authority and protect their high-margin internet service defenses.

For instance, Honor's mobile phone AI assistant integrates multiple large model services but still prioritizes "on-device AI" as a key development direction. Manufacturers ranked outside the top five may find it more pragmatic to collaborate with strong AI companies like ByteDance but will also strive for more favorable terms in the partnership, such as reducing cooperation costs and obtaining more technical support.

Buyer Bargaining Power: User Demand and Expectations for AI Mobile Phones. Users are the ultimate purchasers in the market, and their demands and expectations shape product sales and market development.

While the Doubao AI mobile phone offers convenience and innovative experiences, users also harbor concerns about privacy leaks and commercialization issues. In terms of privacy, the AI mobile phone assistant requires system-level permissions to read the screen, potentially accessing sensitive information like bank card details and chat records.

Users worry that the AI assistant may act as an "intermediary," steering them towards purchasing high-priced goods or directing them to platforms that charge hefty commissions, thereby increasing consumption costs. For example, users may suspect that when the AI recommends flights, it may not provide the best options due to merchants paying high service fees. Therefore, users will exercise more caution when purchasing and using the product, demanding higher standards for its safety and reliability.

Excluding Apple, the "Top 5" smartphone vendors in the Chinese market (Vivo, Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, OPPO) command nearly 80% of the market share, while ZTE (including Nubia) holds less than 2%. The market share data vividly portrays the competitive landscape of the Chinese smartphone market.

The top five vendors dominate the majority of the market share, forming a highly concentrated market with a significant Matthew effect.

ZTE's minuscule market share puts it at a disadvantage in regular market competition, limiting its survival space. This explains why ZTE is willing to collaborate with ByteDance, relinquishing some system permissions in exchange for differentiated AI competitiveness and traffic buzz, a desperate yet bold gamble for a weak player seeking to break out in a fiercely competitive market.

To safeguard their interests, top vendors will inevitably take resistance measures against products like the Doubao AI mobile phone that may threaten their market position.

As of June 2025, the number of mobile internet users in China has surpassed 1.116 billion, indicating a vast potential market.

For the Doubao AI mobile phone, this represents a broad avenue for development. If it can successfully promote itself and gain user recognition, it has the opportunity to acquire a large user base and achieve commercial monetization.

This also attracts numerous competitors, making market competition exceptionally fierce. At the same time, such a massive user base imposes extremely high requirements for privacy protection and the rationality of business models. Once issues arise, they may trigger severe trust crises, affecting the product's market prospects.

Meanwhile, the monthly active users (MAU) of domestic AIGC apps surpassed 100 million by the end of 2024, with Doubao exceeding 50 million MAU.

Doubao commands nearly half of the AIGC app market, demonstrating its strong competitiveness and user base in this field. This provides certain user support for the development of the Doubao AI mobile phone, facilitating its promotion and popularization.

However, the characteristics of tool-type products, such as users leaving after use, difficulty in retention, and monetization, also prompt ByteDance to urgently seek new business growth points, such as launching hardware products like AI mobile phones that are closely tied to users' daily lives, to further mine user value and maximize commercial interests.

For instance, Honor's mobile phone AI assistant integrates multiple large model services but still prioritizes "on-device AI" as a key development direction. This data indicates that top mobile phone manufacturers adopt a balanced strategy when facing the impact of AI technology.

On one hand, they integrate multiple large model services to maintain technological openness and diversity, absorbing excellent external technological achievements. On the other hand, they focus on developing on-device AI, emphasizing their control over core technologies.

While preserving their own ecological advantages, top vendors are also actively exploring new avenues for integrating AI technology with mobile phones to cope with market competition and industry changes.

For the Doubao AI mobile phone, this means that to stand out in the market, it must not only achieve technological innovation breakthroughs but also devise differentiated competition strategies against top vendors to build its unique competitive advantages.

Conclusion

The path to balancing technology, ecosystems, and interests is arduous and lengthy.

The emergence of the Doubao AI mobile phone represents a significant attempt to integrate AI technology into the mobile phone realm. It not only showcases the potential of AI technology but also exposes the deep-seated dilemmas in its development.

The industry turmoil it has triggered already reflects the ecological barriers and legal challenges faced during the transition of AI technology from "tools" to "agents."