Tencent's AI Chatbot Yuanbao Tops China's iOS App Store

An artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Chinese tech company Tencent Holdings has risen to the top position as the most downloaded free app in China’s iOS App Store, overtaking DeepSeek.

Tencent’s Yuanbao reached the No 1 spot in the free app rankings on Monday, while DeepSeek dropped to second place. ByteDance's Doubao was positioned fourth, just behind China’s official taxation app.

The surge in popularity for Yuanbao, which was launched in May of the previous year, can largely be attributed to Tencent integrating DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model in February. This integration provided users with an additional choice alongside Tencent's own Hunyuan model.

Following this news, Tencent's shares, which are listed in Hong Kong, saw a 1.6 percent increase on Tuesday.

Tencent, known for operating China’s largest social media platform WeChat, made it easier for users to access Yuanbao by adding a download button for the chatbot within WeChat just last week. This move could potentially grant access to Yuanbao for WeChat's massive user base of approximately 1.3 billion people.

Data shows that the daily active users of Yuanbao surged to 3 million at the end of February, a significant increase from a few hundred thousand earlier in the month, according to Li Bangzhu, the founder of AIcpb.com, a platform that monitors developments in AI applications.

Tencent, AI, Chatbot