Alibaba’s Quark surpasses ByteDance’s Doubao, DeepSeek as China’s top AI app

Quark’s rapid ascent comes as Alibaba has transformed the app from a cloud storage and search service into an ‘AI super assistant’

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A Quark advertisement at the airport in Nanning, China. Photo: Simon Song

Published: 9:30am, 13 Apr 2025

Alibaba Group Holding’s revamped artificial intelligence (AI) assistant app, Quark, which offers a user-friendly interface, has surpassed ByteDance’s Doubao to become China’s most popular AI app in March, showing its appeal among local users.

Quark ranked at the top among Chinese AI apps with nearly 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) worldwide, followed by ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, which had almost 100 million and around 77 million users, respectively, according to Aicpb.com, which tracks the popularity of AI products.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The website aggregates data from Apple and Google’s app stores around the world, as well as Chinese Android stores, but excludes direct visits to the chatbots’ websites. Alibaba previously said that Quark, available as both mobile and desktop apps, had a total of 200 million users, although it has not specified the user numbers for each platform.

A smartphone showing ByteDance’s Doubao AI assistant. Photo: Shutterstock

A separate report released in early March by US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ranked Quark as the sixth-most popular AI app globally by MAU, just behind Baidu’s AI Search and trailing OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI-enhanced Edge browser.