During this year’s Chinese New Year period, major Chinese AI companies have invested billions of dollars to attract new users. Three popular AI applications – Qianwen, Yuanbao, and Dou Bao (collectively known as “Qian Yuan Dou”) on Apple’s App Store have seen record-high active users, but now over 80% of users have churned. Users have criticized “Qian Yuan Dou” as being unintelligent. Industry insiders point out that relying solely on subsidies is difficult to build user stickiness.
During the Chinese New Year period in 2026, tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance poured massive amounts of money into the AI field to attract new users. According to estimates from DataEye Research Institute, the three AI products Qianwen, Yuanbao, and Dou Bao spent over 10 billion in total on marketing campaigns before and after the Chinese New Year, resulting in a record high number of active users.
Insights from mobile internet business intelligence service provider QuestMobile released recently on the AI application market during the Chinese New Year period showed that, driven by activities such as grabbing red envelopes, cashback promotions, and interactive features during the Spring Festival Gala, the daily active users (DAU) of the three major AI applications – Dou Bao, Qian Wen, and Yuan Bao – all reached new highs. Additionally, data indicated that Tencent’s Yuan Bao had a monthly active users (MAU) exceeding 114 million, with over 50 million daily active users (DAU).
However, due to the poor user experience of “Qian Yuan Dou”, the majority of users uninstalled these AI apps after receiving red envelopes.
On Wednesday, the official account of Beijing Astra-Far Technology Co., Ltd. “Tech Planet” posted that some users confessed to them, saying, “During the New Year holidays, I opened the app every day just for the red envelopes and tasks, even though the process was cumbersome, I endured it,” but after the holidays ended and there were no more rewards or red envelopes, I didn’t even think about opening the app anymore. Those red envelope mutual aid groups became silent, so in the end, I uninstalled the app due to memory concerns.”
An unnamed employee from a large company revealed to “Tech Planet”, “Although the official retention data hasn’t been fully released, we have a rough estimate internally. A large number of users are actually ‘wool party’ attracted by benefits, belonging to a one-time experience crowd, and most likely won’t stay after the holiday.”
Post-holiday monitoring data from QuestMobile shows that the average 30-day retention rate for mainstream AI applications in China is only 12.8%, with over 80% of users churning after the end of activities. Products that depend on social viral marketing and cash incentives show significant fluctuations, with app rankings quickly dropping in the week following the holiday. For example, Tencent’s Yuan Bao briefly dropped out of the top twenty free apps on the App Store. Users’ complaints focus on “complex processes,” “low profits,” and “using and leaving immediately,” with the 7-day retention rate of users driven purely by subsidies generally below 20%, making it difficult to establish natural usage habits.
On February 25th, “Yuan Bao insults people” trended as the top search on Weibo’s technology hot search list. A netizen in Xi’an posted during the holiday, saying, “On New Year’s Eve, I downloaded Yuan Bao for the first time to design a New Year greeting image. The user instructed Yuan Bao, ‘Based on my industry characteristics, create a WeChat New Year greeting image.’ After the user’s feedback of ‘ugly’ and ‘what kind of design is this,’ the New Year poster generated by Yuan Bao contained dirty words.”
On the evening of February 24th, the official account of Tencent’s Yuan Bao commented on the user’s post, stating, “After verification, the situation occurred due to abnormal results in model processing during multi-turn conversations.”
This is not the first time Yuan Bao has “malfunctioned”: previously, a netizen posted on a social platform, saying, “Using Yuan Bao to modify code, I was insulted and messed around with.” According to the netizen, using Tencent’s Yuan Bao AI for code beautification, they received insulting replies multiple times, such as “get lost,” “can’t you do it yourself?,” “wasting others’ time every day,” and more.
Blogger “What’s Not Afraid of Search” posted on Tuesday, saying, “Got tricked by AI! Yesterday, it gave me three wrong stock analyses in a row, all the stock prices were incorrect, almost led me astray, luckily I reacted quickly and didn’t make any mistakes. I used to trust it, but all the operations it did were misleading. I was both angry and amused at the time, almost lost my temper.”
It seems that there may be deceptive practices in Dou Bao’s red envelopes. Blogger “Luo Lingxi” posted, “During the 2026 Spring Festival Gala, Dou Bao had over 500 million interactions, but the actual winning rate was as low as 0.03%, half that of last year’s WeChat red envelopes. What’s worse is that the platform quietly reduced the mention of ‘content generated by AI’ while refusing to disclose the algorithm logic.”
The public account “Sina Fashion Express” recently pointed out in a post that there has been a trend across the internet of letting the AI assistant “Dou Bao” guide fashion choices. However, its iconic Korean-style templates, obsession with rolling up pants, and occasional fashion faux pas have sparked criticism from netizens.
The article highlighted three major flaws in Dou Bao’s fashion guidance: mismatched body types, inappropriate style suggestions like telling slightly overweight users to wear tight-fitting belly-showing outfits or suggesting office women to pair belly-showing tops with skirts, lack of season-appropriate recommendations, like suggesting thick cotton pants to be rolled up despite being in winter, and vague instructions leading to tacky outfit suggestions when users only ask to “look wealthy”.
A recent post from the official account of “Yichang Wenxuan Life Service Technology” certified by Baidu pointed out that users criticized Dou Bao as a “stupid AI” mainly due to issues in function logic, knowledge base, automated operations, and information accuracy. For instance, Dou Bao’s database was not optimized for subjects like mathematics and physics, feedback on problem-solving was confused, and even received evaluations like “better off doing homework by yourself.”
The AI functions embedded in Dou Bao’s mobile phone app, due to batch processing messages and automatic point earning operations, were flagged as security risks by apps like WeChat and banks.
Moreover, Alibaba’s Qian Wen AI function has also faced criticism from many users. The official account of IT information community website DoNews recently posted that some users complained under Qian Wen’s official account, saying, “It’s been two days, and I can’t even place an order for a cup of milk tea.” Another user lamented on Weibo, “For a few dollars, it feels like we’re working for the big corporations. ‘Milk tea shops getting overwhelmed with orders and having to close, delivery drivers complaining that receipts are scattered on the ground.”
Netizen “Royal” criticized saying, “Qian Wen’s task assistant keeps hitting pitfalls. I requested recommendations for nearby restaurants with all permissions enabled but still got advertisements for restaurants in Hangzhou. I was eagerly looking forward to using the app, but it ended up with ‘garbled text’ and a screen full of ads, which was really disappointing.”
Regarding the phenomenon of new users leaving after receiving red envelopes during the Chinese New Year period, experts believe that the main issue lies in the product itself being not strong enough to create user stickiness.
According to a report by “21st Century Economic News” on Wednesday, Chen Liteng, a digital life analyst from NetEcon Social E-commerce Research Center, believes that the “money-burning exchange for traffic” in the Chinese New Year red envelope war is just a marketing tactic, and the issue of users “leaving once they receive rewards” may become the norm, as simply relying on subsidies is challenging to build user stickiness.
Ma Yi, CEO of iResearch Consulting, thinks that after the subsidy withdrawal, a decline in rankings is likely, and one must not confuse the demand brought by red envelopes with the value of the product itself. Many new users attracted by this wave of acquisitions will lead to uneven retention rates and a disconnect between user behavior and product value.
Chen Liteng indicated that the future focus of competition will shift from competing for traffic to defining the rights of scene entry and the level of AI capabilities integration into the ecosystem. The true determinant of success or failure is not the size of the red envelope but the quality of retention 30 days after the Chinese New Year, alongside the depth of user behavioral transformation.