Has Doubao gained another friend?

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Zhou Zhiyu

In the last month of 2025, the "Doubao Phone" jointly launched by ByteDance and ZTE will push the industry's competition for the next generation of super entry points to a new climax. Against this backdrop, apart from ZTE, which other smartphone manufacturers will collaborate with ByteDance on the new "Doubao Phone" is highly anticipated.

Vivo, Lenovo, Transsion, and others have appeared on ByteDance's target customer list for promoting cooperation. However, the path to advancing this software and hardware marriage is destined to be full of uncertainties.

On December 26, it was reported that Lenovo plans to launch its first "AI Super Intelligent Agent" aimed at the global market during CES (Consumer Electronics Show) early next year, positioning it as a strategic application for the company, directly competing with the Doubao Phone Assistant, but featuring cross-device connectivity and coordination, enabling seamless collaboration among Lenovo's smartphones, PCs, tablets, and wearable devices for continuous task execution.

Wall Street Journal learned from Lenovo that the company indeed plans to release the "AI Super Intelligent Agent," but did not disclose specific product positioning and technical routes.

It is worth mentioning that on the same day, at the 2025 Lenovo Tianxi AI Ecosystem Partner Conference, Lenovo revealed that its strategy in the personal AI field is "Tianxi AI, integrated across multiple ends," aiming to evolve Tianxi AI (Tianxi Personal Super Intelligent Agent) from a tool that responds to commands into a "Personal AI Twin" with preliminary understanding, memory, and execution capabilities.

Tianxi AI is a very open ecosystem, allowing users to choose Doubao Agent as one of the intelligent interaction entry points. Building on last year's integration of the Doubao large model into Lenovo's PC AI assistant "Ruyi," this conference also announced that with the help of the Doubao large model "Super Brain," Ruyi will upgrade from a traditional system tool assistant to an intelligent conversational comprehensive assistant.

In other words, Lenovo Group has been maintaining close cooperation with ByteDance's Doubao, Volcano Engine, and other businesses.

Although a new AI Super Intelligent Agent that competes with the Doubao Phone Assistant may be launched, the relationship between Lenovo and ByteDance may still be one of mutual cooperation and win-win.

However, the competition for super entry points in the AI era has just begun, with ByteDance eager to expand its hardware cooperation territory based on the technological advantages accumulated by Doubao, while hardware manufacturers are unwilling to become mere "pipelines" and are increasing their self-research efforts. This struggle for core control over AI smartphones is bound to be full of variables and games.

As early as 2023, Lenovo shouted the slogan "AI for All." It is important to note that the traditional PC industry has not had exciting news for a long time. At the end of 2022, ChatGPT sparked a new wave of AI, which was as exhilarating as the steam engine revolution and made technology giants like Lenovo see significant opportunities.

Lenovo Group Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing revealed earlier this year that Lenovo has completed a key leap from "vision" to "reality" in its AI strategy: AI PCs are in mass production and on the market, enterprise AI solutions are widely deployed, and AI services are deeply integrated into industries, covering three major business areas: devices, infrastructure, and services Lenovo Group has clearly defined "hybrid AI" as the strategic focus for the next decade, aiming to build differentiated technology paths and product solutions based on the integration of "personal intelligence + enterprise intelligence + public intelligence."

As the global leader in PCs, Lenovo Group's AI superintelligence is not only intended to serve the mobile side but also to support multiple terminals such as mobile phones and PCs, achieving full ecological collaboration.

According to IDC data, Lenovo's core mobile phone brand Motorola shipped approximately 16 million units in the third quarter of this year, with a global market share of 4.9%, ranking only eighth in the global smartphone market. In an industry where the Matthew effect is evident, Lenovo must seize the opportunities brought by the AI era to potentially lead Motorola to break through in the global market.

However, unlike the technical route chosen by Doubao mobile assistant, Lenovo has opted for the A2A (Agent-to-Agent) path to achieve its goal of creating an "intelligent terminal AI OS."

It is understood that ByteDance's cooperation idea is to pre-install AIGC plugins on the devices of partner manufacturers, empowering more hardware terminals with the core capabilities of Doubao mobile assistant.

Previously, it was reported that vivo and ByteDance have confirmed their cooperation, and both parties are discussing specific cooperation details. However, as of now, neither ByteDance nor vivo has officially announced this.

With Doubao having firmly established its position as the number one AI native app in China, along with its revolutionary capabilities such as cross-app operations and simulating human command execution, ByteDance is clearly not easily rejected by major smartphone manufacturers.

On December 4th, Meizu Technology also sent a cooperation invitation to Doubao via its official Weibo account, clearly expressing its "expectation for an opportunity for in-depth cooperation to create better AI phones."

In response to rumors that OPPO rejected ByteDance's related cooperation, at a recent media exchange event, OPPO ColorOS Smart Product R&D Director Jiang Yuchen denied this, stating that OPPO's overall approach has always been relatively open, prioritizing user experience needs and not excluding cooperation with any manufacturer, mainly depending on whether there are good cooperation opportunities.

After all, for hardware manufacturers, directly accessing mature AI capabilities may quickly fill technical gaps and more rapidly capture users' minds for AI phones. No manufacturer would firmly close the door on win-win cooperation.

However, Jiang Yuchen also mentioned that there is currently no complete consensus on how to cooperate, and OPPO is in contact with various manufacturers.

OPPO believes that GUI Agent (the AI technology used by Doubao mobile assistant, which OPPO is also exploring) is a fallback solution for covering long-tail scenarios. For some high-frequency scenarios and high-frequency internet manufacturers, OPPO prefers to achieve ecological interconnection through the Agent to Agent approach. "The attempts in this area for mobile phones can actually affect the whole system because its ecological position is very special."

In Jiang Yuchen's view, the phone developed in cooperation with ZTE as an engineering machine can be more aggressive. However, OPPO's overall user base is significant, with ColorOS having over 750 million monthly active users globally, and OPPO's system-level AI assistant Xiaobu also exceeding 170 million monthly active users. If a service is launched and most of the services become unavailable the next day, This is a quality incident at OPPO, which is unacceptable.

OPPO's considerations are clearly also the concerns that most mobile phone manufacturers currently have when deciding whether to cooperate with ByteDance.

More importantly, the competition for the AI super entrance has just begun. For hardware manufacturers like Lenovo, the core value of AI phones lies in mastering the "AI soul" of the device and the "command authority" of the software ecosystem.

Once overly reliant on ByteDance's Doubao Assistant, hardware manufacturers may become mere hardware providers, losing bargaining power in the future commercial ecosystem. After all, the rise of AI Agents will rewrite the commercial ecosystem of mobile applications, giving birth to new cooperation models after the "Apple tax" and "Android tax." Whoever masters the AI entrance will hold the new commercial initiative.

In this battle to reshape the future software ecosystem order, no party can back down. Whether ByteDance can resolve the cooperation dilemma, whether hardware manufacturers can smoothly pursue self-research, and how the ecological layout of major internet companies will affect the landscape will all be focal points of industry attention in the future