Alibaba’s Quark Overtakes Doubao, DeepSeek to Lead China’s AI App Race

Alibaba Group’s AI application, Quark, has surged ahead of major players like ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, becoming China’s most popular AI app in March, according to rankings from Aicpb.com.

The newly enhanced app has gained significant traction among Chinese users, thanks in part to its intuitive design and broad functionality.

Quark currently boasts around 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) worldwide, while Doubao and DeepSeek follow with 100 million and 77 million, respectively.

Aicpb.com, which aggregates app data from global Apple and Google stores, as well as Chinese Android platforms, excludes direct website visits in its metrics.

Meanwhile, Alibaba previously stated that Quark has reached 200 million total users across mobile and desktop, though it did not provide a platform-specific breakdown.

The app’s momentum follows Alibaba’s strategic pivot—transforming Quark from a simple search and cloud storage tool into a comprehensive “AI super assistant.”

The shift appears to be paying off. In a recent report from US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Quark was ranked the sixth most-used AI app globally, trailing only behind Baidu’s AI search, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s AI-powered Edge browser.

Quark’s relaunch introduced its Gwen reasoning models, designed to emulate critical thinking and handle complex queries across tasks like academic research, content generation, medical diagnostics, coding, and more.

This positions Quark at the forefront of a broader movement in China’s tech sector: the race to develop AI super apps capable of performing a wide array of functions to drive user engagement in an increasingly competitive market.

Notably, DeepSeek sparked this trend earlier in the year with its own all-in-one AI app—lauded for achieving impressive results at a fraction of the cost of global counterparts like ChatGPT.

Innovation Heats Up as Tech Firms Step Up

In a bid to replicate the runaway success of its flagship app Douyin, ByteDance is doubling down on its AI ambitions.

The company has been steadily enhancing its chatbot Doubao, equipping it with capabilities such as coding assistance, image and text generation, and web search integration.

According to sources, ByteDance is now testing video-generation features, signalling a push to make Doubao a more versatile AI companion.

Meanwhile, Tencent Holdings is advancing its own AI offering, Yuanbao, by embedding it with autonomous AI agents—tools capable of performing tasks independently on behalf of users.

Tencent has also integrated Yuanbao into WeChat, branding the feature as the “Red Envelope Assistant.”

This integration allows the chatbot to serve a broad array of user needs, and gives Tencent access to WeChat’s massive user base of over 1 billion daily active users, providing a powerful distribution channel.

On another front, DeepSeek has been making quiet yet significant strides.

The company recently introduced a new reasoning method, fuelling speculation that it’s preparing to launch a follow-up to its R1 model, rumored to be named DeepSeek-2.

Though it was previously reported that there is a potential release by the end of the month, the company has remained silent, with its customer service team reportedly dismissing the rumours.

What is confirmed, however, is that DeepSeek is actively developing an upgraded model called DeepSeek-V3-0324.

As competition among China’s AI giants heats up, the race to build more powerful, multifunctional AI tools is accelerating.

The real question is: who will lead this next phase of innovation?