ByteDance and ZTE’s Doubao Mobile Assistant quickly ran into platform risk controls, forcing feature rollbacks and highlighting a broader clash between phone-level agents and app-controlled ecosystems. SMU Professor of Computer Science Pradeep Reddy Varakantham said he was surprised by how quickly the situation escalated to a full blockade, and by ZTE’s decision to grant system-level accessibility permissions without app developers’ consent. He warned that agents will threaten apps’ advertisement and revenue models by reducing time spent in them, and raised concerns over errors and accountability when actions are taken without explicit user approval. Prof Reddy said that coexistence would require trade-offs, such as paid app interfaces and revenue-sharing with agents.
