ByteDance's short-drama app Hongguo has overtaken its AI assistant Doubao in users, becoming the group's second-largest app behind Douyin. Hongguo reached 430 million users in September, ahead of Doubao's 419 million, in a reshuffle that puts entertainment ahead of AI inside China's biggest app factory. The numbers come from an industry report on China's mobile internet, and they land as growth in the country's overall user base slows to under one percent a year. The contest now is not for new users, but for the hours of the ones already there.
A new number two inside ByteDance
According to QuestMobile's China Mobile Internet Autumn Report, released on 3 November, Hongguo Free Short Drama had 430 million users in September, against 419 million for Doubao. That made Hongguo ByteDance's second-largest app by users, after Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — which had 1.029 billion users.
China's mobile internet has stopped growing. The user base reached 1.281 billion in September, up just 0.9 percent on a year earlier, while the average user spent 189.8 hours a month online, up 6.5 percent. With almost no new users to win, the biggest companies are fighting over the same people's time, and short drama is winning that fight.
Doubao vs DeepSeek: the depth race tightens
Doubao is still used more often than its closest AI rival, but the gap is closing. Its users opened it 72 times a month and spent 132.5 minutes on it, against 65.9 opens and 136.7 minutes for DeepSeek. Doubao's frequency and time both fell from the previous quarter, by 6.1 and 7.8 percent, while DeepSeek's rose 5.8 and 9.5 percent.
The wider AI app market is still expanding fast. Native AI apps reached 546 million monthly users in September, up 82.1 percent on a year earlier. But the report's message is that the land grab for users is over, and the contest has moved to how often people return and how long they stay.
Short drama's three-year sprint
Short drama's rise has been startlingly fast. Apps in the category grew from 10 million users to 400 million in under three years, a compound annual rate of 443.1 percent. Short dramas and short videos together supplied 111.5 percent of the net increase in time spent online, more than offsetting declines in traditional video and other categories.
Traditional long-form video lost 1.38 billion hours of viewing time over the year, while short dramas gained a net 13.329 billion hours. Generative AI apps added 978 million hours — the third-largest contribution, but a fraction of drama's gain. The audience is moving, and it is moving toward the shortest content.
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The headline is a changing of the guard, but the detail is more interesting. Doubao has not shrunk — 419 million users is still enormous — and AI apps as a group are growing faster than almost anything else. What changed is that short drama grew faster still, and it did so by selling time rather than utility.
An AI assistant is opened to get something done; a short drama is opened to fill a gap. ByteDance, unusually, owns both sides of the contest, and the same company that builds Doubao is also pushing its assistant into cars and travel bookings.
The longer game may be convergence: production costs for some AI-made short dramas have fallen 80 to 90 percent, according to industry data cited in the report, so the app that beat Doubao may soon be filled with content its sibling generated.
The warning sign for Doubao is not Hongguo but DeepSeek. Losing users to a sibling app costs ByteDance nothing; losing engagement depth to a rival does. Doubao's quarterly declines in frequency and time, against DeepSeek's gains, suggest the assistant race is now about habit, not headcount — and habits are harder to win back than downloads.
Why It Matters
For Doubao, the ranking is a reputational knock rather than a crisis: it remains China's most-used AI app, but it is no longer ByteDance's second-biggest product, and that changes how its momentum reads inside the company and outside it. For the wider market, it shows that AI's advance is not a straight line.
Even in a year when AI apps grew 82 percent, the fastest-growing thing on Chinese phones was a soap opera. For users, little changes today, and ByteDance has been adding paid services such as travel booking to make the assistant pay — but an AI app that cannot keep its users' attention will have to earn its keep another way.
Background
Doubao rose to become China's most-used AI assistant on the strength of general-purpose chat, overtaking rivals that arrived earlier. Its parent has since spread the assistant across cars, travel and office tools, betting that ubiquity matters more than any single ranking — the full story of that rise is in our account of how Doubao became China's number-one AI app.
Source: China Daily's report on the QuestMobile figures and 36Kr's account of the report
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