As smartphone innovation reaches its peak, AI is becoming the key to breaking the impasse. Recently, the "Doubao Phone" jointly developed by ZTE and ByteDance has attracted significant attention in the industry. According to an internal source at ZTE, the company chose ByteDance as its first AI partner due to a shared belief in "AI phones as a certain future," as well as the core philosophy of "openness equals innovation." Notably, ZTE clearly stated that the collaboration with ByteDance is just the beginning. The company has already received multiple cooperation invitations from large model manufacturers and is actively building a diverse and open AI phone ecosystem.
The "AI for All" Strategy: Beyond Single-Point Collaboration
ZTE emphasized that its "AI for All" strategy rejects closed integration and advocates for decoupling hardware platforms from large model capabilities. This means that future ZTE AI phones may allow users to freely switch between different large models—using Doubao today to generate copy, then calling Tongyi Qianwen tomorrow to analyze documents, and switching to Kimi the day after to handle scientific research tasks. This "Model as a Service" (MaaS) architecture will completely break the industry convention of "one phone, one AI."
Why Choose ByteDance First? Scenario Synergy Is Key
Although maintaining an open attitude, ZTE has prioritized cooperation with ByteDance. Analysts believe this is due to the Doubao App already having over 200 million monthly active users, and ByteDance's unique advantages in multimodal understanding, short video content generation, and personalized recommendations, which are highly aligned with high-frequency mobile applications such as imaging, social media, and office work. The Doubao Phone may deeply integrate AI photo editing, intelligent video editing, and cross-app command execution features, creating a smooth experience through "edge-side + cloud-side" collaboration.
Industry Breakthrough: From "Parameter Wars" to "Intelligent Experience"
Currently, the mobile phone industry faces an innovation bottleneck, and manufacturers urgently need to reshape user experiences through AI. ZTE's move not only accelerates its own product intelligence but also sends a signal to the supply chain: future competition is not about chip benchmarks, but about the openness and service capabilities of AI ecosystems. If successful in multi-model compatibility, ZTE could become the "Android of AI phones"—providing a unified interface that allows developers and users to freely choose smart engines.
AIbase believes that ZTE's open approach is strategically forward-looking. When AI becomes the "new operating system" of phones, whoever controls the ecological entry point defines the next generation of human-computer interaction. In this transformation, ZTE chooses not to be "a subordinate of models," but rather "a bridge of intelligence"—this may be the crucial leap for Chinese phone manufacturers to overtake in the global AI race.
