In the final month of 2025, the launch of the "Doubao Phone," a joint venture by ByteDance and ZTE, escalated the industry-wide competition for the next-generation super gateway to a new peak. Against this backdrop, attention has intensely focused on which other smartphone manufacturers, besides ZTE, will partner with ByteDance to create new "Doubao Phones." Companies including Vivo, Lenovo, and Transsion have reportedly appeared on ByteDance's list of target partners for advancing collaboration. However, the path forward for this union of software and hardware is inevitably fraught with uncertainty.
On December 26, reports emerged that Lenovo plans to launch its first "AI Super Agent" for the global market during the CES (International Consumer Electronics Show) early next year. Positioned as a strategic application for the company, it is said to directly compete with the Doubao Phone Assistant, but with a distinct feature set focused on cross-device connectivity and orchestration, enabling seamless collaboration across Lenovo's portfolio of smartphones, PCs, tablets, and wearables for continuous task execution. Wall Street News learned from Lenovo that the company does indeed have plans to release an "AI Super Agent," but specific product positioning and technical roadmap details were not disclosed.
Notably, on the same day at the 2025 Lenovo Tianxi AI Ecosystem Partners Conference, Lenovo revealed that its strategy in the personal AI domain is "Tianxi AI, One Body, Multiple Ends." The future goal is to evolve Tianxi AI (Tianxi Personal Super Agent) from a tool that responds to commands into a "Personal AI Twin" with preliminary capabilities for understanding, memory, and execution. Tianxi AI is described as a highly open ecosystem where users can choose the Doubao Agent as one of their intelligent interaction gateways. Building on last year's integration of the Doubao large model into Lenovo's PC-side AI assistant "Ruyi," the conference also announced that, with the help of Doubao's "super brain," Ruyi will be upgraded from a traditional system tool assistant to an intelligent, conversational, comprehensive assistant.
This indicates that Lenovo Group has maintained close collaboration with ByteDance's Doubao and Volcano Engine businesses. Even with the potential launch of a new AI Super Agent that competes with the Doubao Phone Assistant, the relationship between Lenovo and ByteDance is likely to remain one of cooperation and mutual benefit.
However, the battle for the AI era's super gateway has only just begun. On one side, ByteDance, leveraging the technical advantages accumulated by Doubao, is eager to expand its hardware partnership landscape. On the other, hardware manufacturers, unwilling to be reduced to mere "pipes," are ramping up their own R&D efforts. This contest for control over the core of AI phones is destined to be full of variables and strategic maneuvering.
As early as 2023, Lenovo proclaimed its "AI for All" slogan. It is worth noting that the traditional PC industry had lacked exciting news for a long time. The AI wave ignited by ChatGPT at the end of 2022, as振奋ing as the steam engine revolution, presented a significant opportunity for tech giants like Lenovo. Lenovo Group's Chairman and CEO, Yang Yuanqing, revealed earlier this year that the company had completed the critical leap from "vision" to "reality" in its AI strategy: AI PCs were mass-produced and launched, enterprise AI solutions were widely deployed, and AI services were deeply implemented across industries, comprehensively covering the three major business segments of devices, infrastructure, and services.
Lenovo Group has clearly defined "Hybrid AI" as the strategic core for the next decade, aiming to build differentiated technology paths and product solutions based on the integration of "Personal Intelligence + Enterprise Intelligence + Public Intelligence." Clearly, as the global PC leader, Lenovo's ambition for its AI Super Agent extends beyond just serving the smartphone side; it aims to serve multiple endpoints like phones and PCs, achieving ecosystem-wide synergy.
According to IDC data, the shipment volume of Motorola, Lenovo's core smartphone brand, was approximately 16 million units in the third quarter of this year, capturing a 4.9% global market share and ranking only eighth in the global smartphone market. In an industry with significant Matthew Effect, Lenovo must seize the opportunities presented by the AI era to potentially lead Motorola to break through in the global market.
However, differing from the technical path chosen by the Doubao Phone Assistant, Lenovo has opted for an A2A (Agent-to-Agent) approach to achieve its goal of creating an "AI OS for smart terminals." It is understood that ByteDance's cooperation model involves pre-installing AIGC plugins on partner manufacturers' devices, empowering more hardware terminals with the core capabilities of the Doubao Phone Assistant.
Previous reports suggested that Vivo and ByteDance had confirmed a partnership and were discussing specific details. However, as of now, neither ByteDance nor Vivo has made an official announcement. With Doubao firmly holding the top position among domestic AI-native apps and demonstrating revolutionary capabilities like cross-app operation and simulating human command execution, ByteDance is unlikely to be easily shut out by major phone manufacturers.
On December 4, Meizu Technology also extended a cooperation invitation to Doubao via its official social media account, explicitly stating it "looks forward to the opportunity for in-depth collaboration to create better AI phones." Responding to rumors that OPPO had refused to engage in related cooperation with ByteDance, Jiang Yuchen, OPPO's ColorOS Smart Product R&D Director, denied this during a recent media exchange. He stated that OPPO's overall approach has always been quite open, prioritizing user experience needs, and does not exclude cooperation with any manufacturer, depending mainly on whether there is a good opportunity for collaboration.
After all, for hardware manufacturers, directly integrating mature AI capabilities might quickly address technical shortcomings and capture user mindshare for AI phones faster. No manufacturer would firmly close the door on mutually beneficial cooperation. However, Jiang Yuchen also noted that there is no complete consensus yet on how to collaborate, and OPPO is engaging with various companies.
OPPO primarily views GUI Agent (the AI technology used by Doubao Phone Assistant, which OPPO is also exploring) as a fallback solution for covering long-tail scenarios. For high-frequency scenarios and major internet service providers, OPPO prefers achieving ecosystem interconnection through Agent-to-Agent methods. "Attempts in this area on phones have wide-ranging implications because the phone's own ecological position is very special," Jiang explained. In his view, the Doubao phone co-developed with ZTE, as an engineering prototype, can afford to be more aggressive. But given OPPO's massive user base—Color OS has over 750 million monthly active users globally, and OPPO's system-level AI assistant Breeno boasts over 170 million MAUs—if a service launched and most functionalities became unavailable the next day, it would be considered a quality incident at OPPO and unacceptable.
OPPO's considerations clearly reflect the concerns of most current smartphone manufacturers when deciding whether to partner with ByteDance. More importantly, the battle for the AI super gateway is just beginning. For hardware manufacturers like Lenovo, the core value of AI phones lies in controlling the device's "AI soul" and the "command authority" over the software ecosystem.
Over-reliance on ByteDance's Doubao Assistant risks reducing hardware makers to mere hardware providers, potentially causing them to lose bargaining power in the future commercial ecosystem. Ultimately, the rise of AI Agents is poised to reshape the commercial landscape of mobile applications, potentially giving rise to new cooperation models following the "Apple Tax" and "Android Tax." Whoever controls the AI gateway will hold the new commercial initiative.
In this reshaping battle concerning the future order of the software ecosystem, no party can afford to retreat. Whether ByteDance can resolve its cooperation dilemmas, whether the hardware manufacturers' self-developed paths will be smooth, and how the ecosystem layouts of internet giants will influence the landscape will all be key focal points for the industry moving forward.
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