In 2025, the domestic AI assistant market landscape undergoes significant changes.

According to QuestMobile's "2025 Q3 AI Application Value Rankings," Doubao, with 159 million monthly active users and 34.47 million monthly average downloads, surpasses DeepSeek for the first time to become the dual champion, marking a new phase where the market shifts from DeepSeek's lead to Doubao's dominance.

However, amidst this ebb and flow, the contrasts are stark. QuestMobile's "2025 Q3 AI Application Value Rankings" data reveals that Kimi, once a star product, sees its monthly active users decline by approximately 30% from 14.072 million in Q2 to 9.926 million, falling below the 10 million mark and experiencing a significant drop in market position.

On the other hand, Qianwen achieves explosive growth. In the "AI Product Rankings - Application Rankings - Domestic Overall Rankings TOP30" for November 2025, the Tongyi Qianwen App's monthly active user growth rate reaches a staggering 149.03%, ranking first on the global AI product growth chart and becoming the fastest-growing AI application worldwide.

In the same track (translated as "field" or "sector" for context), Doubao and Qianwen exhibit strong growth momentum, while Kimi experiences a decline in user base and market position. What are the reasons behind this?

Why Does Kimi Fall Behind?

If one were to select the "Most Disappointing AI Product of 2025," Kimi would likely be a top contender.

In 2024, Kimi emerged as the brightest new star in the domestic AI sector. With its remarkable long-text processing capabilities, it quickly rose to prominence, being hailed by users as the "Best Chinese GPT Alternative." Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, was also highly anticipated, with its valuation soaring to $3.3 billion, becoming a flagship of Chinese AI innovation.

Just a year later, Kimi's luster quickly faded. Its monthly active user count has dropped out of the top five, with its scale less than half of leading products like Doubao and DeepSeek, even falling below the 10 million mark. Once a "celebrity" on the "pedestal," Kimi now nearly becomes a niche tool used by a minority.

Kimi's predicament is not without traces, rooted in a dual imbalance of strategic rhythm and execution efficiency.

Firstly, premature commercialization has eroded user trust. Kimi's core competitiveness lies in its long-text processing capabilities, but this advantage has also become a heavy cost burden. Massive token consumption has led to a surge in computational costs, forcing it to introduce a paid membership system in Q3, shifting from free to paid.

It is understood that Kimi's membership subscriptions are divided into three tiers: Adagio (free version, with limited deep research and OK Computer usage); Andante (49 yuan/month, with moderate deep research and OK Computer usage); Moderato (99 yuan/month, with more deep research and OK Computer usage).

Charging is not inherently wrong; the issue lies in this transition occurring at a stage where user habits are not yet solidified, and product stickiness remains weak, directly leading to significant user loss and a double blow to reputation and retention.

Secondly, delayed product iteration has diluted its technological edge. Against the backdrop of competitors like DeepSeek and Doubao continuously releasing major updates and rapidly expanding into multimodal and vertical scenarios, Kimi's product evolution appears slow and singular.

In September, Kimi launched the Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 version, extending context length to 256K tokens and enhancing programming capabilities and third-party tool compatibility. However, the market response was tepid, failing to establish a sustainable technological barrier.

Crucially, unlike Doubao's deep integration with ByteDance's ecosystem or Qianwen's reliance on Alibaba's ecosystem, Kimi, as an independent application, lacks a strong ecosystem traffic entry point and application scenario support. When other competitors achieve natural user growth and retention through a "platform + scenario" dual-wheel drive, Kimi lacks ecosystem synergy resources, making it difficult to continuously reach and retain users.

Kimi once stood at the forefront but missed opportunities due to strategic imbalances. While there may still be future opportunities, the time left for Kimi is running out.

Why Does Doubao Ascend to the Top?

In 2023, while public attention focused on pioneers like Kimi and ERNIE Bot, ByteDance quietly launched the AI assistant "Doubao," with its overseas version, Cici, also going live simultaneously. At the time, this move did not attract much attention. However, just two years later, Doubao has firmly established itself as China's leading AI application in terms of daily active users and usage volume.

At the 2025 Winter FORCE Conference, Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, revealed that as of December this year, the daily average token usage of Doubao's large model has surpassed 50 trillion, a more than tenfold increase year-on-year. Currently, over 100 enterprise clients have accumulated token usage exceeding one trillion.

From a low-key entry to industry leadership, Doubao's rise stems from a clear differentiated path.

Firstly, Doubao precisely positions itself in the mass market, effectively lowering the usage threshold by providing lightweight, scenario-based functions and attracting a broad user base.

Doubao does not pursue high-threshold sectors like "research-grade long-text" or "professional code generation." Instead, it clearly focuses on the daily, high-frequency, and practical needs of mass users, transforming from a "toy" for a few into a tool for the majority. For example, writing copy, creating summaries, conducting research, generating short video scripts, and translating conversations make it an "AI companion" for young people...

Secondly, Doubao fully integrates into ByteDance's product matrix, acquiring traffic and usage scenarios through platforms like Douyin and Toutiao, achieving efficient reach and user accumulation.

As is well known, ByteDance boasts national-level applications like Douyin, Toutiao, Feishu, and CapCut, covering diverse scenarios such as entertainment, news, office work, and creation. The deep symbiosis between Doubao and ByteDance's vast product matrix integrates AI capabilities like "utilities" into the existing product ecosystem. This ecosystem synergy effect is a moat that other independent AI companies find difficult to replicate.

Furthermore, Doubao significantly enhances reasoning efficiency and effectively controls computational costs under massive service demands through the MoE architecture and UltraMem sparse model, providing an economically viable technical foundation to support hundreds of millions of daily active users. Taking Doubao-1.5 Pro as an example, it introduces the MoE (Mixture of Experts) sparse activation mechanism, with a total parameter scale reaching hundreds of billions to trillions, but only activating about 1/7 of the parameters per reasoning.

In the AI popularization phase, technological advancement is merely an entry ticket. The true competitiveness lies in seamlessly integrating AI into the daily lives of hundreds of millions of users. Doubao has already taken a leading step in this new race.

How Does Qianwen Ascend?

In the fierce competition of the domestic AI assistant market, Alibaba, though seemingly "a step behind," demonstrates astonishing acceleration and structural advantages.

On November 17, Alibaba launched the public beta of the Tongyi Qianwen App. Surprisingly, this product surged into the top three of Apple's China free overall rankings just three days after its launch. More astonishingly, it achieved over 30 million monthly active users (MAU) in just 23 days, becoming the fastest-growing AI application globally.

Qianwen does not start from scratch; it is born with two ace cards: the Qwen3-Max large model and Alibaba's ecosystem.

Since its full open-source release in 2023, the Qwen series has surpassed 600 million downloads globally, establishing a broad recognition and application foundation among developers. Its flagship model, Qwen3-Max, surpasses global top-tier closed-source models like GPT-5 and Claude Opus in multiple authoritative benchmark tests, consistently ranking among the world's top three.

This provides Qianwen App with a solid performance guarantee, enabling it to face international first-tier competition in core experiences such as comprehension, reasoning ability, and multi-round dialogue.

Qianwen's other core competitiveness comes from Alibaba's unparalleled complete business ecosystem layout.

On the consumer side, it is a chatty and capable personal AI assistant, connecting Alibaba's e-commerce, payment, local life, entertainment, and travel high-frequency scenarios, becoming users' "digital alter ego."

A user's request: "Help me plan a trip to Sanya and book hotels and tickets." Qianwen can then collaborate with applications like Fliggy, Amap, Taopiaopiao, and Ele.me to complete the entire process from recommendation, price comparison, booking, to payment. This deep integration of "entry as service" achieves a dimensional reduction strike against single-function applications, significantly enhancing user stickiness and lifecycle value.

On the business side, Alibaba plans to open up Qianwen's capabilities to enterprises through API plugins, helping various industries create exclusive (translated as "bespoke" or "customized") industry models, realizing "Enterprise-Specific GPT." This enables each enterprise to quickly possess a dedicated AI assistant that understands its business, safeguards its data, and performs its tasks at a lower cost.

It is worth mentioning that while most vendors are still vying for end-users, Alibaba has already constructed a global open-source community with technology as the bond (translated as "link" or "bond") through open-sourcing the Qwen series. This enables Tongyi Qianwen to evolve not just as a consumer-facing product but also as an industrial platform empowering enterprises and developers.

Undoubtedly, in the second half of the AI assistant competition, centered around connectivity and services, Qianwen has seized a favorable position by unblocking the "model - scenario - platform" meridians.

2026: Accelerated Reshuffle

Looking back at the 2025 Chinese AI assistant market, a clear dividing line has emerged.

Kimi gradually falls behind due to premature commercialization and lack of ecosystem support; Doubao maintains its lead through unique C-end experiences, ecosystem integration advantages, and efficient operations; Tongyi Qianwen successfully carves out a differentiated growth path by leveraging Alibaba's technological accumulation and ecosystem through dual-wheel drive in the B-end and C-end markets.

The market differentiation among leading APPs reveals a clear industry trend: technological leadership is a necessary starting point but far from the decisive factor for success. Future leaders must simultaneously possess top-notch productization capabilities, strong ecosystem integration forces, and sustainable commercialization models. For Kimi, finding its irreplaceable value proposition amidst industry giants has become its core challenge.

Undoubtedly, in 2026, the AI assistant market will accelerate its reshuffle.