China Mobile App Radar: May‘26 in review

Research evidence excerpt

China Mobile App Radar: May‘26 in review

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Internet - China

China Mobile App Radar: May’26 in review

Industry Overview

Key app data trends in May’26 22 June 2026

We track various mobile app engagement data per QuestMobile to help gauge user Equity

behavior trends across AI/social/digital entertainment/ecommerce/verticals. For May’26, China

we observed 1) AI chatbot: Doubao (ByteDance) DAU recovered in early June close to Internet/e-Commerce

new high; Deepseek time spent per DAU notably higher post V4 model, maintaining lead Alex Liu >>

over peers; 2) Taobao DAU recovered in May, but PDD still holds notable time spent Research Analyst

lead; 3) ByteDance’s Soda Music DAU kept rising and now higher than all TME’s major Merrill+852 3508Lynch5090(Hong Kong)

apps with time spent catching up quickly; 4) Travel category saw weak-than-seasonal alex.liu3@bofa.com

time spent recovery post CNY with notable YoY decline of time spent in May; 5) Miranda Zhuang, CFA >>

Research Analyst

Xiaohongshu time spent looks plateaued since late 25; Bilibili time spent grow Merrill Lynch (Hong Kong)

healthily; 6) Tencent’s key evergreen games engagement remains stable, with Delta miranda.zhuang@bofa.com

Force time spent up notably MoM; 7) Bytedance’s short drama app Red Fruit time Joyce Ju >>

spent surpassed Kuaishou main app for the first time. Merrill Lynch (Hong Kong)

joyce.ju@bofa.com

AI: engagement divergence with leader widening lead Joanna Du >>

Doubao weekly DAU/total time spent grew to 163.7mn/12.3bn in the week of June 1, Merrill Lynch (Hong Kong)

followed by DeepSeek’s 32.2mn/3.8bn, Yuanbao’s 8.6mn/658mn and Qwen’s joanna.du@bofa.com

28.6mn/840mn. On a per user level, most AI apps show stable trends in daily user time

spent and daily sessions.