By Vincent Chow

Copyright scmp

ByteDance-owned Doubao remains the most popular artificial intelligence app in mainland China, with 157 million monthly active users (MAUs) in August, as rival DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot continued to lose market share.
Launched by TikTok and Douyin owner ByteDance in August 2023, Doubao has recorded consistent growth so far this year, with a 6.6 per cent increase in the number of users from July, according to data compiled by market research firm QuestMobile.
By contrast, second-ranked DeepSeek’s chatbot saw a further decline in user numbers last month, down 4 per cent from July to 143 million MAUs.
According to QuestMobile data, almost 40 per cent of users who left DeepSeek’s chatbot in May switched to Doubao.
Doubao’s lead in the mainland’s consumer-facing AI app market reflects ByteDance’s efforts to regularly upgrade the chatbot, which in May added a real-time video call function that turns the app into an interactive digital assistant.
Beijing-based ByteDance has been “very serious” about improving Doubao’s features, according to Li Bangzhu, founder of AI product popularity tracker Aicpb.com.
“They constantly think about what practical problems need to be solved and in which application contexts, rather than merely piling up model capabilities – although that is still the foundation,” Li said.

Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s eponymous chatbot has lagged behind the competition in terms of features. It lacks multimodal capabilities, while Doubao and other AI assistants have added support for text, image, audio and video generation, as well as AI-powered online search.
Decreasing user numbers for DeepSeek’s chatbot showed a stark contrast from its popularity earlier this year, when it rode on the back of the Hangzhou-based start-up’s release of the R1 open-source reasoning model to wide industry acclaim.
In January, DeepSeek’s chatbot dethroned OpenAI’s ChatGPT to claim the top spot on Apple’s US App Store.
Since then, other AI assistants have chipped away at the DeepSeek chatbot’s share on the mainland.
According to QuestMobile data, third-ranked Yuanbao from Tencent Holdings saw a 22.4 per cent jump in users to nearly 33 million MAUs in August.
A new addition to the mainland’s top-10 AI app leaderboard was Ant Group’s AQ health app, which was launched in June and saw a 60.1 per cent month-on-month increase in users in August, QuestMobile data showed.
Alibaba Group Holding’s fintech affiliate last week said nearly 60 per cent of the AQ app’s users were from third-tier and lower cities across China. Alibaba owns the Post.
Competition among Chinese AI-native apps has now entered a critical “scale-and-retain” stage, according to analyst Zhu Jiali from AI Insight, a domestic AI industry research firm.
“The competition for market share in the broader ecosystem will be won and lost based on different players’ distribution channels and their respective penetration of various application contexts,” Zhu said.