More than 150 apps, including Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Taobao, have refused to let ByteDance’s Doubao Phone Assistant operate them, the AI agent’s team said Wednesday, October 14, as a 30-day opt-out period ended, Yicai reported.
Doubao Phone Assistant is a system-level agent that works the way a person does: it reads the screen and taps through apps’ graphical interfaces. That means it doesn’t technically need an app’s permission or API to use it. After a bruising first launch, ByteDance decided to ask anyway, and a large chunk of China’s app economy said no.
How we got here: the December 2025 standoff
This fight started ten months ago. ZTE launched the Nubia M153, the first phone with Doubao Phone Assistant built in, on December 1, 2025, as an engineering model priced at 3,499 yuan (about $495) and sold only to developers and industry professionals, Yicai reported at the time.
Within days, users said WeChat was logging them out with a warning about “an abnormality in the login environment” when the assistant tried to run it. Banking apps from Agricultural Bank of China and China Construction Bank showed pop-ups telling users to switch the AI tool off. WeChat said it hadn’t taken any deliberate action and that its routine security controls had probably been triggered.
The technical reason was a permission. The M153 gave the assistant INJECT_EVENTS, a high-level Android permission normally reserved for system components, which lets software read the screen and simulate taps. “In essence, Doubao Mobile Assistant has been configured as if it were part of the operating system, rather than a third-party software,” one expert told Yicai. ByteDance said the assistant only used the permission with explicit user consent, wouldn’t perform payments or identity checks on users’ behalf, and didn’t store screen content in the cloud or use it for training.
ByteDance switched off WeChat operations on December 3, and soon after said it would restrict automation in banking, payments, points-farming and competitive gaming, China Daily reported. It also said it had no plans to build its own phones and was talking to multiple manufacturers.
How the opt-out works
The October list is the formal version of that retreat. The mechanism is called SAEP, the Screen Automation Execution Protocol. Per Doubao’s developer page, developers can declare whether the agent may operate their app, down to individual pages or intended actions, either by integrating the protocol or by filling out a form or emailing. Apps on the refusal list won’t be operated.
Developers can still opt out after the notice period, and Doubao says it will respond within three working days. The list is updated every Wednesday.
For now it applies to two ZTE phones, the Nubia M153 and Nubia NaviX Ultra. Caixin notes that the consumer version of the NaviX Ultra, carrying the consumer edition of the assistant, went on sale September 16.
Think of SAEP as a robots.txt for phone screens: a voluntary “please don’t” that only works because the agent’s maker agrees to honor it.
Who said no
The headcount was 151 in National Business Daily’s report, while Guandian counted 153 on the same day. Either way, the breakdown is telling. Per Yicai:
- 65 apps tied to Tencent, including WeChat, QQ and the game Honor of Kings.
- 23 tied to Alibaba, including Taobao, Alipay and Qwen.
- 14 from Kuaishou and 11 from Meituan.
- Banking apps from ICBC and China Merchants Bank, and all three major telecom carriers.
- Rival AI apps DeepSeek, Kimi, Tencent’s Yuanbao and Kuaishou’s Kling AI.
The list doesn’t give reasons for each app’s decision. But the pattern is hard to miss: the companies saying no are the ones that own China’s payments, messaging, shopping and food delivery, plus ByteDance’s direct AI competitors.
The two real objections: liability and leverage
The security case is real. Back in December, a senior security executive told Nikkei Asia, as quoted by Business Standard, that Doubao had been “granted excessively broad permissions, so extensive that it can open virtually any app without relying on an API.” His bigger worry was accountability: “If a user claims they transferred money to the wrong person after instructing Doubao to do so, who is responsible: the user, Doubao, or us?”
That question has no settled answer, and financial apps in China operate under far tighter rules than a shopping app. Banks have good reason to refuse until regulators or contracts assign the blame.
The competitive case is just as real. An agent that sits on top of every app gets to own the customer relationship. If you tell your phone “order dinner,” the agent picks the restaurant, the platform and maybe the coupon. WeChat and Alipay are not about to let ByteDance become the front door to their own users, and Caixin frames the fight as one over data compliance, privacy and automated access.
Those two motives don’t cancel each other out. A company can have a genuine security concern and also a strong business reason to voice it loudly.
Why it matters beyond China
The pitch for phone agents everywhere is the same: you say “book the table and pay for it,” and the AI handles the apps. That only works if the apps cooperate. When the two biggest app ecosystems in a country, plus the banks and carriers, opt out, the agent can’t do much of the everyday stuff people actually want.
Western phone makers and AI labs are building versions of the same idea, with agents that read screens and tap through apps. China is running the standoff first, at scale, and with a public list. Whoever builds those agents elsewhere will face the same three questions: who consents, who’s liable, and who gets the customer.
The catch
ByteDance controls both the agent and the list. Developers have to trust that SAEP declarations are honored, and there’s no outside audit we’re aware of. The opt-out is also an opt-out, not an opt-in: apps that never heard of SAEP are fair game by default.
The takeaway
Our read: give ByteDance credit for building an opt-out instead of just scraping screens and daring anyone to stop it, especially after December’s lockouts showed where that leads. But the result shows that “the AI uses your apps for you” is a business negotiation, not just a technical problem.
What to watch: whether the list shrinks as companies cut deals or integrate SAEP at the page level, whether more phone makers beyond ZTE ship the assistant, whether Chinese regulators weigh in on liability for agent-made payments, and whether Apple, Google and Western app makers end up running the same standoff.
Image: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
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