ByteDance’s Doubao is holding on to its crown as the most popular artificial intelligence app in mainland China. In August, the chatbot hit 157 million monthly active users (MAUs), according to data from QuestMobile. That’s a steady 6.6 percent jump from July.
Its biggest rival, DeepSeek, hasn’t been as lucky. The company’s chatbot slipped further, with user numbers dropping 4 percent from July to 143 million MAUs.
Why Users Are Choosing Doubao
QuestMobile’s numbers show that almost 40 percent of people who stopped using DeepSeek’s chatbot back in May ended up moving over to Doubao.
So what’s keeping Doubao ahead? A big factor has been ByteDance’s constant push to improve the app. In May, for example, the company rolled out a real-time video call feature that lets people use Doubao more like a personal digital assistant.
Li Bangzhu, founder of AI product tracker Aicpb.com, explained it this way: “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.”
DeepSeek Struggles to Keep Up
Meanwhile, DeepSeek hasn’t kept pace when it comes to features. While competitors like Doubao are already handling text, images, audio, video, and even AI-powered online searches, DeepSeek’s chatbot still lacks those multimodal abilities.
It’s a sharp contrast from earlier this year when DeepSeek was enjoying a moment in the spotlight. The Hangzhou-based start-up made waves with the launch of its open-source reasoning model, R1, and even topped Apple’s US App Store in January, beating out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But since then, its momentum has slowed as other AI assistants gained ground in China.
Tencent and Ant Group Catch Up
It’s not just a two-player game, though. Tencent’s chatbot Yuanbao ranked third in August with almost 33 million MAUs, up a healthy 22.4 percent from the previous month.
Another rising star is Ant Group’s AQ health app. Launched in June, it quickly broke into the top 10, growing its user base by 60.1 percent in August alone. Ant said nearly 60 percent of AQ’s users come from smaller, third-tier cities and beyond.
The Next Phase of the AI App Battle
Industry experts say the race is now less about who can grow the fastest and more about who can keep their users coming back. Analyst Zhu Jiali from AI Insight put it this way:
“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.”
In other words, the real winners will be the apps that not only scale but also find smart ways to stay useful in people’s daily lives.
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