Chinese smartphone companies are using AI to kill smartphone apps – Computerworld

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by Mike Elgan

Contributing Columnist

How AI is killing smartphone apps in China

opinion

Aug 3, 20267 mins

Chinese smartphone makers have been followers in the global market, embracing the concepts and paradigms set in the past 20 years by Apple and Google. But AI may be giving the Chinese an opportunity to break away and set their own path forward.

Specifically, Chinese companies are integrating AI more fully into smartphones, and also using AI for limited robotics in phones. Here&rsquo;s what you need to know about these emerging trends.

China&rsquo;s ZTE recently showed its Nubia NaviX Ultra. The phone runs ByteDance&rsquo;s Doubao AI agent, which users can access with voice commands or by pressing a button on the phone. The phone has no home screen and no conventional app store.

Another Chinese company, called StepFun — it was founded in 2023 by Jiang Daxin, a former Microsoft vice president and chief scientist at Microsoft&rsquo;s Software Technology Center Asia — sells a phone called the StepX Neo. It runs a proprietary operating system called Step AOS based on Android, Linux, and an RTOS containing a built-in AI agent called Step Amoo. The StepX Neo splits phone functions into four primitives (communication, apps, files, system tools) that the agent recombines based on the stated goals of the user.

Honor, a phone maker spun off from Huawei, has an AI agent the company built with input from Alibaba called the YOYO Intelligent Agent. It ships on Honor&rsquo;s entire MagicOS 10-eligible lineup.

Note: an American company is enabling this. All three phones use Anthropic&rsquo;s Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give system-level access to the agents.

None of these phones will become available in the United States. ZTE is banned from the US by the FCC over national-security concerns, while the StepFun and Honor phones are built for the Chinese market with no US version planned.

All modern smartphones can run AI. By simply visiting the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, anyone can download dozens of AI apps, including those offered by the frontier model companies. Or they can use the AI services and tools built in to phones by Apple and Google.

How agentic AI phones are different

What&rsquo;s different about the new agentic AI phones in China is that the operating system itself has an agentic AI layer that enables it to function across apps and instead of apps.

While agentic AI phones represent a minority of the current market, they feel like the future. And that future is consequential. First, it&rsquo;s a another step toward independence from Android. Google&rsquo;s services layer is already gone from China. Now the Android app layer is being replaced by vertically integrated agent stacks owned by Chinese super-app companies.

Despite building agentic features that cross app boundaries to a limited degree, Apple and Google are unlikely to allow third-party agents to replace the app layer of their mobile OSs anytime soon.

Apple takes 15% to 30% of app revenue. And (according to an estimate introduced during the Epic v. Apple/Google litigation but not confirmed by Google), the Play Store has historically accounted for somewhere between 17% and 26% of Google&rsquo;s operating income. The entire economic logic of iOS and Android depends on apps. An agentic layer that dissolves those apps into tasks isn&rsquo;t something either company wants to think about. The Chinese OEMs can blow up the app model because they had no stake in it.

Meanwhile, the AI trend is suffocating mobile app in-app purchases, which dropped by roughly 40% by early 2026, even as people pay more for those purchases compared to a few years ago (because they&rsquo;re dominated by subscriptions to AI and vibe-coded apps). In other words, even inside the app stores, there&rsquo;s a shift from the old app model to AI replacements.

AI is not only changing the software model, but the hardware model, too.

Robot phones

Another categorical way China is splitting off from the global smartphone concept is the nascent market of robot phones. A robot phone is one that uses AI to control physical robotic components on an actual phone.

The leading contender in this field is a device called the Honor Robot Phone, which I...