In 2025, ByteDance made a strong entry into the smart terminal market with the &#34;Doubao Phone Assistant,&#34; attempting to establish Doubao as the &#34;brain&#34; and &#34;soul&#34; of smartphones through an authorized partnership with ZTE.
At that time, the market was full of expectations for this strategy, and mid-tier manufacturers in urgent need of AI empowerment were seen as the most ideal potential allies for Doubao. The industry was optimistic about this &#34;soft and hard alliance&#34; breakthrough model.
However, just three months later, Meizu, which had previously extended an olive branch, had to announce a halt to updates due to the pressure of rising storage chip prices and skyrocketing supply chain costs brought on by the AI wave.
This was not an isolated case. ASUS, a brand that had long been marginalized in the mobile phone industry, also announced this year that it would no longer launch new devices, focusing instead on PCs and AI equipment.
While mid-tier players struggled to cope, leading manufacturers like Xiaomi, Huawei, and Honor doubled down on self-developed AI large models, firmly guarding their own software and hardware moats, making it difficult to entrust the &#34;soul&#34; of smartphones to Doubao.
To make matters worse, the explosive popularity of OpenClaw reshaped the entire industry's defenses, with major tech giants launching mobile versions of OpenClaw. This open-source model, which does not require deep hardware binding, directly posed a dimensional challenge to ByteDance's strategy.
As potential hardware allies fell one after another in the price surge, and leading manufacturers and competitors quickly built high walls using open-source frameworks, ByteDance's logic of &#34;only doing ecology, not touching hardware manufacturing&#34; is facing severe challenges in the commercial game:
There are really not many allies left for the Doubao phone.
<img src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/7f13a732-71bc-4c35-bb37-cf7182496226.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg" alt="" original-src="https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://wpimg-wscn.awtmt.com/7f13a732-71bc-4c35-bb37-cf7182496226.png"/>
<h2>Industry Winter</h2>
In December 2025, the Doubao phone (M153), jointly created by ByteDance and ZTE Nubia, received widespread attention upon its release.
As the first terminal product focused on AI fully automated control, the Doubao phone was seen by the industry as an important milestone in the transition from smart interaction to AI autonomous execution.
The initial stock was quickly sold out, and second-hand platforms even saw a surge in prices and daily rental experiences.
Amid the excitement, the market's attention quickly turned to the next suspense: after ZTE, who would become Doubao's partner?
In no time, manufacturers like Transsion, Lenovo, and Meizu were listed as potential partners.
In December last year, All Weather Technology sought to verify the possibility of cooperation with Meizu, and an insider revealed, &#34;The two sides are in contact.&#34;
However, this &#34;soft and hard marriage,&#34; which was highly anticipated by the outside world, could not withstand the harsh reality of winter.
Due to factors such as the explosive demand for AI server computing power, storage chip prices soared.
At the February earnings conference, Lenovo Group Chairman Yang Yuanqing admitted that the price increase of storage had reached 40% to 50% in the last quarter, and the increase &#34;could double&#34; in the current quarter, with the price increase trend spreading to more core components.
Meizu, which had once actively engaged, ultimately could not survive the reshuffle and, along with ASUS, quietly announced a halt to updates related to its mobile phone business
At the same time, realme also announced the end of its independent operations and a full return to the OPPO Group, which is seen as a move to resist the uncontrollable risks of rising supply chain prices.
Transsion is also facing difficulties. In 2025, revenue decreased by 4.5% year-on-year, while net profit attributable to the parent company plummeted by over 50% year-on-year.
Transsion's performance report is filled with the helplessness of mobile phone manufacturers: on one hand, the soaring prices of components such as storage are crazily squeezing profit margins; on the other hand, in order to maintain product competitiveness in a red ocean, they have to stubbornly increase R&amp;D investment and brand marketing expenses.
The continuous collapse and strategic contraction of small and medium-sized manufacturers have rapidly shrunk the ally camp of Doubao phones.
It is clearly difficult for leading manufacturers to become allies of Doubao.
Delving into the underlying system and taking over cross-application invocation permissions is akin to handing over the keys to one's own backyard for leading mobile phone manufacturers.
For this reason, leading mobile phone manufacturers are generally busy building high walls, trying to keep the control of &#34;automated execution&#34; in their own hands.
All-weather technology has noticed that potential ally Lenovo has &#34;turned against&#34; them.
On March 18, Lenovo grandly launched the &#34;Tianxi AI Claw,&#34; directly playing the card of &#34;zero-cost deployment, plug-and-play,&#34; and equipped with a massive array of exclusive skills covering high-frequency scenarios such as office, learning, and entertainment.
Lenovo's turnaround is just a microcosm of the industry; leading players in the smartphone race have already heavily bet on AI.
Huawei, starting from the full integration of the Pangu large model into the HarmonyOS 4 system, has clarified its route: Xiao Yi is not just a voice assistant but the brain of the operating system.
By the time of the HarmonyOS 6 system, Xiao Yi has upgraded to a unified entry point for intelligent services, relying on system-level deep integration, capable of cross-application operations and automatically executing complex tasks;
Honor has also launched the AI assistant YOYO, which can perform functions such as e-commerce price comparison and food delivery ordering, marking the beginning of the AI terminal ecosystem company's transformation battle;
Vivo released its self-developed large model matrix consisting of three parameter levels: 1 billion, 10 billion, and 100 billion, made up of five language large models, and has successfully run the 1B, 7B, and 13B edge large models;
Xiaomi has also recruited former DeepSeek researcher Luo Fuli to lead the development of AI models, demonstrating its determination to invest in AI strategy.
With the explosive popularity of OpenClaw, the efficiency of AI layout for leading mobile phone manufacturers has significantly improved.
Manufacturers such as Huawei, Xiaomi, and Honor are all trying to integrate OpenClaw with their own ecosystems.
For example, Huawei has chosen to deeply integrate OpenClaw with its Harmony ecosystem. The &#34;Xiao Yi Claw&#34; recently exposed by Huawei executive He Gang is positioned as a user-exclusive AI assistant that can handle documents, write PPTs, and automatically reply to emails, achieving plug-and-play and multi-end collaboration.
Xiaomi, known for its AIoT ecosystem, is also not to be outdone, recently announcing the launch of &#34;Xiaomi Miclaw,&#34; directly establishing underlying control capabilities.
Honor is also accelerating its pace, simultaneously launching the highly topical &#34;Honor Lobster Universe,&#34; allowing users to interact deeply with virtual &#34;little lobsters&#34; directly on their phones through YOYO
In the context of major domestic companies collectively building high walls while small and medium-sized enterprises are withering away, Doubao seems to have no choice but to look overseas for breakthroughs.
Recently, there have been rumors in the market that ByteDance is in talks with Samsung. All Weather Technology sought confirmation from ByteDance regarding this news, but as of the time of publication, no comment was received.
From a highly publicized and attention-grabbing start to the current state of confusion, ByteDance's hardware breakthrough is facing severe challenges.
<h2>Potential &#34;Anti-Dou&#34; Alliance</h2>
The isolation in hardware is just the first hurdle; Doubao phones also face encirclement from other internet giants of similar scale.
Just three days after the release of the Doubao Phone Assistant, WeChat took the lead in launching an attack.
Multiple Doubao phone users reported that when using the Doubao Assistant to operate WeChat across applications, the system frequently triggered warnings about abnormal login environments, even leading to forced logouts of WeChat accounts.
Following this, apps from the Alibaba ecosystem and financial applications like China Construction Bank also tacitly joined the &#34;ban&#34; camp.
Behind this collective boycott, while there are certainly data security concerns arising from the overly high permissions of system-level AI assistants, the deeper commercial game lies in the fact that no internet giant can tolerate having its traffic entry controlled by a competitor like ByteDance.
If the ban on application ecosystems is a predictable defensive battle, then the explosion of open-source technology has truly shaken the foundational moat of Doubao phones.
Since the beginning of this year, the open-source AI agent execution framework OpenClaw has rapidly penetrated from the geek circle to individual consumers with its core capability of &#34;self-executing tasks,&#34; completing automated processes by simulating user operations.
With the explosive popularity of OpenClaw, the exclusive appeal of Doubao phones as &#34;native AI phones&#34; must now be questioned.
Internet veterans are attempting to achieve a dimensionality reduction strike with lightweight entry points.
Although the main battlefield of OpenClaw is still on the computer side, major internet companies have quickly launched mobile versions.
Recently, Baidu officially entered this track, launching the world's first mobile lobster application &#34;Red Claw&#34; (renamed from the Hong Shou Zhi Operator).
Users only need to register simply to command this &#34;mobile lobster&#34; to cross traditional app ecological barriers and directly execute cumbersome operations like booking tickets and ordering food.
In March of this year, Alibaba also launched a mobile version of the &#34;One-Click Shrimp Farming&#34; product JVS Claw, which has a built-in self-evolving &#34;universal skill&#34; mechanism that currently covers high-frequency scenarios such as browsing the web, scraping information, and automatically filling out forms.
&#34;In fact, even robots are using OpenClaw now,&#34; an insider from a major internet company in Beijing lamented to All Weather Technology. &#34;The explosive popularity of OpenClaw brings a more macro perspective; it could potentially serve as an operating system-level capability for the new era, connecting to almost all hardware, breaking down existing device barriers, and forming a more integrated ecosystem.&#34;
Another AI developer in Beijing boldly predicted to All Weather Technology: &#34;Based on the open-source OpenClaw-like framework, it could directly become a standard feature for AI phones in the future.&#34;
The individual pointed out that open source endows OpenClaw with strong neutrality and ecological appeal. In the current landscape of hardware and software competition, terminal manufacturers harbor reservations against any internet oligarch attempting to control system-level entry points. However, the open-source nature of OpenClaw allows various hardware manufacturers to confidently integrate it into their OS foundations without worrying about being &#34;controlled by others.&#34;
The OpenClaw framework is more like the Linux of the AI era, providing the entire industry with a set of automated execution standards, allowing each company to build differentiated moats on this basis.
Since all it takes is to download a lightweight application and activate the convenient &#34;shrimp farming&#34; mode to seamlessly experience an AI phone without changing the current device, purchasing a deeply bound Doubao phone is clearly no longer a more attractive option.
With the rising tide of smartphone prices, the user replacement cycle is being extended, bringing more uncertainty to Doubao phones.
This underlying revolution triggered by OpenClaw is essentially a battle among various players for the definition of the system. Faced with the new ecological foundation jointly constructed by software and hardware manufacturers, Doubao phones, which attempt to rely on centralized large models to capture traffic, clearly need to reassess their breakthrough logic.
<h2>Hardware Curse</h2>
After launching the Doubao phone, Zhang Yiming expressed some regret, stating, &#34;If only we had persisted with the Smartisan phone back then, we wouldn't have lost much money in a year, and we wouldn't be so passive today.&#34;
This slightly regretful reflection perfectly encapsulates the best annotation of ByteDance's years of exploration in hardware.
In this field of hardware manufacturing that requires long-term nurturing, ByteDance, accustomed to the internet pace, seems to lack the gene of &#34;patience.&#34;
Rewinding to 2019, ByteDance made a significant investment by acquiring the Smartisan Technology's Nut phone team, planning to double down on the smartphone market.
But just two years later, faced with lackluster sales, ByteDance decisively hit the brakes.
After pausing phone development, ByteDance did not abandon its quest for the &#34;next ticket to the era.&#34;
In 2021, with the metaverse trend in full swing, ByteDance spent 9 billion yuan to acquire VR headset manufacturer Pico, intending to replicate Meta's hardware myth on Chinese soil.
The logic behind this bet was still impeccable: the growth of short videos would eventually plateau, and VR could very well be the next super entry point.
But the familiar script played out again. The lack of a hardware ecosystem and a sluggish consumer market caused ByteDance to lose enthusiasm after just two years.
With the release of the new flagship headset being shelved, Pico's grand narrative came to an abrupt halt.
As the era of large models arrived with great momentum, ByteDance once again found itself at the starting line of hardware. The Doubao smart glasses project, originally filled with high hopes, was reported to be paused in early 2026 due to &#34;the difficulty of achieving true differentiation.&#34;
From Smartisan phones to Pico headsets, and then to the shelved glasses, every expedition by ByteDance follows the same pattern: identifying a potential next-generation entry point and using massive funds to break through. However, when faced with the necessary time-consuming challenges of supply chain management, channel development, brand accumulation, and hardware iteration, they quickly retreat.
**
This is essentially a complete failure of the &#34;traffic thinking&#34; from the App era in the hardware field. Code and algorithms can be quickly developed, but the refinement of the manufacturing system cannot be hastened by simply flooding it with traffic.
Today, Doubao Phone is becoming another test of ByteDance's patience

IBIT

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EZBC

- In 2025, ByteDance entered the smart terminal market with "Doubao Phone Assistant," attempting to position it as the "brain" of smartphones through cooperation with ZTE.  
- However, rising storage chip prices and supply chain issues led to major brands like Meizu suspending updates, while leading manufacturers focused on their own AI developments, limiting potential allies for Doubao.  
- As competition intensifies with the rise of open-source frameworks like OpenClaw, ByteDance faces significant challenges, including a lack of sturdy partnerships and increased uncertainty surrounding Doubao Phone's market viability.

There are not many allies left for Doubao Mobile