Does Doubao have 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, besides ZTE, which other smartphone manufacturers will collaborate with ByteDance on the new "Doubao Phone" has garnered much attention.

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 filled with uncertainties.

On December 26, it was reported that Lenovo plans to launch its first "AI Super Intelligent Agent" aimed at the global market during the 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 Multi-End," aiming to evolve Tianxi AI (Tianxi Personal Super Intelligent Agent) from a tool that responds to commands to a "Personal AI Twin" with preliminary understanding, memory, and execution capabilities.

Tianxi AI is a very open ecosystem, allowing users to choose the Doubao Agent as one of the smart 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 it may launch a new AI Super Intelligent Agent that competes with the Doubao Phone Assistant, the relationship between Lenovo and ByteDance may still be one of cooperative 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 filled with 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 thrilling 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: the mass production and launch of AI PCs, widespread deployment of enterprise AI solutions, and deep integration of AI services into industries, covering three major business segments: devices, infrastructure, and services.

Lenovo Group has clearly defined "hybrid AI" as the strategic focus for the next decade, based on the integration of "personal intelligence + enterprise intelligence + public intelligence," to build differentiated technology paths and product solutions.

Clearly, as a global leader in PCs, Lenovo Group's AI superintelligence is not only intended to serve the mobile side but also to serve 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 with a significant Matthew effect like smartphones, 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 firmly establishing itself 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 4, Meizu Technology also sent a cooperation invitation to Doubao via its official Weibo account, clearly expressing "looking forward to the opportunity for in-depth cooperation to create better AI phones."

In response to rumors that OPPO rejected ByteDance's related cooperation, during a recent media exchange, OPPO ColorOS Smart Product R&D Director Jiang Yuchen denied this, stating that OPPO's overall solution has always been relatively open, prioritizing user experience needs, and does not exclude 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 also in contact with various manufacturers.

OPPO believes that GUI Agent (the AI technology used by Doubao mobile assistant, which OPPO is also exploring related solutions) is a fallback solution for covering long-tail scenarios, while for some high-frequency scenarios and high-frequency internet manufacturers, OPPO prefers to achieve ecological interconnection through the Agent to Agent approach "The attempts of mobile phones in this regard are actually interconnected, as their ecological niche is very special."

In Jiang Yuchen's view, the phone developed in collaboration between Doubao and ZTE, as an engineering device, can be more aggressive. However, OPPO's overall user base is significant, with Color OS 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 unusable the next day, this is considered a quality incident at OPPO and is unacceptable.

OPPO's considerations are clearly aligned with the concerns that most mobile phone manufacturers currently have regarding whether to collaborate 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 devices and the "command authority" of the software ecosystem.

If they become overly reliant on ByteDance's Doubao assistant, hardware manufacturers may end up as 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 following the "Apple tax" and "Android tax." Whoever controls the AI entrance will hold the new commercial initiative.

In this battle concerning the reshaping of the future software ecosystem order, no party can retreat. 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.

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