China’s AI exports are usually framed as models and chips. The quieter export is the app itself, and the data suggests it may be the most successful of the three.
In Andreessen Horowitz’s August 2025 ranking of the top 100 consumer Gen-AI apps, an estimated 22 of the top 50 mobile apps were developed in China, yet only three are primarily used inside China.[1] The list is credible: mobile apps are ranked by monthly active users via Sensor Tower, web products by visits via Similarweb.[1] ByteDance’s Doubao ranked fourth on mobile; the Chinese cohort clusters in photo and video, where the country’s models lead.[1]
Nearly half the world’s top mobile AI apps are Chinese-built, and most of their users have never been to China.
Show as a table
| Series | Value |
|---|---|
| Chinese-built, used mainly abroad derived: 22 − 3 | 19 apps |
| Chinese-built, used mainly in China | 3 apps |
| Not Chinese-built derived: 50 − 22 | 28 apps |
Source: reference [1] below.
Proof points
The pattern shows up in individual breakouts. In late January 2025, DeepSeek’s app hit number one free on both the US Apple App Store and Google Play, displacing ChatGPT.[2] MiniMax’s companion app Talkie logged around 17 million downloads in the first eight months of 2024, most of them Western users.[3] And ByteDance’s CapCut, the editing engine behind much of the world’s short-form video, has reported more than 200 million monthly users, pressuring Adobe and Canva.[4]
The edge is not mysterious. Chinese consumer-internet teams are forged in the most competitive app market on earth, where retention, monetisation and viral loops are matters of survival, and they carry that discipline into global markets that domestic Western incumbents treat as secondary. The clustering in photo and video is telling: it is where China’s models are strongest and where a design-and-distribution edge compounds fastest. The result is a cohort of products built for a global user from the first line of code, not localised after the fact, which is a structurally different, and more durable, kind of export than a model or a chip.
What it means for capital
The received wisdom is that China builds infrastructure and the West builds the beloved consumer products. The app data says otherwise: Chinese teams are shipping globally competitive AI products, often with a distribution and design edge honed in the world’s most competitive consumer internet. The interesting companies are the ones built for a global user from day one, born global, not localised later. Those are the app-layer names we track most closely.
| Ref | Publication | Date | Supports |
|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | Andreessen Horowitz | Aug 2025 | Top-100 ranking, the 22-of-50 count, Doubao's rank |
| [2] | TechCrunch | Jan 2025 | DeepSeek reaching number one on both US stores |
| [3] | South China Morning Post | 2024 | Talkie download figure and its Western user base |
| [4] | Rest of World | 2023 | CapCut monthly-user figure |
References
- Andreessen Horowitz, “The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps — 5th Edition,” Aug 2025. Read source ↗
- TechCrunch, “DeepSeek reaches No. 1 on US Play Store,” Jan 2025. Read source ↗
- South China Morning Post, “Chinese AI unicorn MiniMax scores big in US with Talkie chatbot entertainment app,” 2024. Read source ↗
- Rest of World, “Stat of the day: CapCut (200M+ monthly users),” 2023. Read source ↗
Every source above is public and linked. This is a research brief from Singularity Dynamics; full briefings on this topic are available on request.