StepFun’s STEPX Neo Debuts as an AI Phone With Doubao’s Old Problem

StepFun unveiled the STEPX Neo in Shanghai on July 13, calling it the world’s first smartphone built natively around an AI agent rather than a stack of apps. The Shanghai AI unicorn paired the device with Step AOS, an operating system running its own assistant, Amoo, and lined up eight launch partners without naming a price, a ship date, or a single confirmed spec.

The partner list looks a lot like the one China’s last agentic phone announced seven months ago, right down to the two superapps missing from it. WeChat and Taobao never signed on, the same two platforms that throttled ByteDance’s Doubao Phone within days of its debut.

Step AOS Rebuilds the Phone Around an Agent, Not Apps

Every major phone brand already has an AI pitch. Apple has Apple Intelligence, Samsung has Galaxy AI, Google has Gemini built into Android. All three sit on top of an operating system that still assumes a human is tapping icons. StepFun says Step AOS was rebuilt from the ground up, pulling pieces of Android, Linux, and RTOS into a new agent-first layer instead of bolting a chatbot onto an existing skin.

The system runs on MCP (Model Context Protocol, the connective standard that lets an AI model call outside tools and data), splitting the phone’s functions into four groups: communication, apps, files, and system tools. Amoo, the agent built into the device, is meant to string those pieces into one finished task rather than stopping at each app’s front door.

The announcement moved fast online. Ice Universe, an X account widely followed among smartphone leaksters, posted that StepFun had declared the start of the agentic phone era before OpenAI had shipped a device of its own.

Amoo’s Job Inside the System

StepFun says Amoo runs offline for core tasks and needs no constant connection. It can translate live conversations, menus, and street signs in 32 languages while traveling, then pull up local transit schedules even without a signal.

That is a different starting point than most of the industry’s AI phones to date, which typically add a dedicated button or a summarizing feature to an existing device the way HMD recently built a dedicated AI button on feature phones like the Nokia 235 4G. StepFun also says the STEPX Neo has cleared L3 on China’s national AI terminal intelligence grading standard, the highest tier currently open for testing, and that no other phone holds that certificate yet.

What We Know:

• Step AOS runs on the MCP standard with four capability groups: communication, apps, files, and system.
• The phone has a dual rear camera and a second display on the back, similar to a glyph-style notification panel.
• StepX Neo has reportedly cleared L3 certification under China’s AI terminal grading standard.

What’s Unconfirmed:

• Retail price and release date.
• RAM, storage, and battery capacity.
• Whether the device will ever launch outside China.

Eight Launch Partners, and Two Notable Absences

StepFun announced its first wave of ecosystem partners the same evening. Amoo is supposed to call on each one to finish a task without the user switching apps:

• Alipay, for payments
• Baidu, for search and maps
• Meituan, for food delivery and local services
• JD.com, for e-commerce
• WPS, for office documents
• CapCut, for video editing
• Trip.com, for travel booking
• Didi, for ride hailing

Two names are missing. WeChat and Taobao, the two apps that most aggressively restricted ByteDance’s Doubao Phone last December, are not on StepFun’s list. Whether a superapp opens its doors to a phone-level agent is not just a technical decision. It touches who owns the customer relationship, and neither Tencent nor Alibaba has settled that question yet.

Doubao’s Agentic Phone Didn’t Survive Its First Week

StepFun is not the first company to try this. ByteDance and ZTE’s Nubia brand launched the Doubao Phone Assistant on the Nubia M153 on December 1, 2025, in a single 16GB and 512GB configuration priced at 3,499 yuan (about $495) for a limited run of 30,000 units. It sold out on its first day.

The pitch was similar: an agent built into the operating system that could book rides, order food, and navigate apps end to end. Within days, WeChat began flagging abnormal logins, and Alipay and Taobao prompted users to disable the assistant before continuing.

By December 5, ByteDance was pulling back. The company suspended the assistant’s access to banking, payments, and gaming rewards, calling the retreat a necessary step to give the technology a more solid and far-reaching future.

To us, Doubao has been granted excessively broad permissions, so extensive that it can open virtually any app without relying on an API.

A senior security executive told Nikkei Asia at the time, describing the industry’s core objection to agents that tap and type the way a human would.

Tencent founder Ma Huateng told an internal company meeting that he opposed sending phone screens to the cloud for an AI agent to read, calling it ‘extremely unsafe and irresponsible.’ Critics went further, nicknaming the assistant a ‘burglar’ with ‘god’s fingertips’ for its ability to read and tap a screen the same way an owner would.

Industry analysts had flagged the structural risk before the backlash even started. Counterpoint Research described the approach as a system-level entry point for AI rather than a feature layered on top, the exact design choice that put it in conflict with the apps it was trying to operate.

StepFun is now running a similar experiment with far more capital behind it.

Who Is Yin Qi?

Yin Qi is the chairman of StepFun, a role he took on in January 2026 to help set the company’s strategy and technical direction. He is best known as a co-founder of Megvii Technology, the facial recognition company behind the Face++ platform, and he separately chairs Afari Technology, a Shanghai-listed firm focused on AI and automotive intelligence.

From Face++ to StepFun’s Boardroom

Megvii was once one of China’s most valuable AI unicorns and was grouped among an earlier generation of the country’s leading AI firms. It spent years pursuing a public listing, first in Hong Kong and later in Shanghai, before shelving those plans.

The Money Behind the Phone

Jiang Daxin, a former Microsoft global vice president, founded StepFun in Shanghai in April 2023 and serves as chief executive. StepFun raised more than CNY 5 billion (about $730 million) in a Series B+ round around the time Yin Qi joined, a record for a single funding round in China’s large-model sector. By May, the company had lined up nearly $2.5 billion more, with money from Huaqin Technology, Longcheer Technology, OmniVision Group, and ZTE.

Those backers together touch most links in China’s phone manufacturing chain, from complete devices to core components. Reuters reported in April that StepFun was clearing the way for a Hong Kong IPO by unwinding its offshore ownership structure. Yicai Global separately reported the company was nearly $2.5 billion in fresh financing as it pushes toward that listing.

Where the Benchmark Claims Get Squishy

StepFun backs its hardware pitch with a stack of model benchmarks, and some hold up better than others under scrutiny.

Step 3.5 Flash, the flash-tier model StepFun open-sourced in February, runs on a sparse mixture-of-experts design with 196 billion total parameters but activates only about 11 billion of them per query. The company’s own published figures put typical output speed between 100 and 300 tokens per second, peaking near 350 tokens per second on single-stream coding tasks.

Its successor, Step 3.7 Flash, released May 29, scores 56.3 on SWE-Bench PRO, a coding benchmark where only Claude 4 Opus ranks higher at 64.3. On ClawEval-1.1, a test of real-world tool use, it takes first place at 67.1, more than seven points ahead of the next closest model.

The on-device Step Edge family is the more aggressive claim. StepFun says it ranks first across 29 benchmarks covering image understanding, OCR, and GUI operation, ahead of rivals like Qwen3-VL and MiniCPM-V. The company has not disclosed which models it tested against or published the comparison data.

StepFun has tried to get ahead of the trust question that sank Doubao. It co-published a security whitepaper with the Shanghai AI Laboratory and says every agent action runs inside a trusted execution environment and leaves an audit trail.

Not everyone is convinced the achievement is finished yet. GSMArena was blunt, writing that the launch ‘seems like a smaller Chinese AI company trying desperately to get some attention away from the big players.’ TechnoSports offered a more measured read, calling it either the start of a genuine new era for phones or a well-timed announcement that still has to survive contact with reality.

What Happens at WAIC on July 17

The next test arrives fast. The World AI Conference opens in Shanghai on July 17, and ByteDance’s second-generation Doubao Phone is confirmed to debut there, four days after StepFun’s event.

Ni Fei, senior vice president of ZTE and president of its Nubia brand, has described the new device as a mass-production flagship rather than another engineering prototype. The update reportedly adds cross-application operation and fills in basic features the first version skipped.

The core problem hasn’t moved, though. Debuting as a mass-production flagship won’t change the fact that WeChat still logs in normally on the Doubao Phone but has not opened its AI operation permissions, and Taobao, Xianyu, and Amap keep the same restrictions in place.

For now, the STEPX Neo exists only as a stage demo. Whether Alipay, Meituan, and the rest let it do more than that starts becoming clear at WAIC on July 17.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Step AOS?

Step AOS is StepFun’s agent-native operating system, rebuilt from pieces of Android, Linux, and RTOS rather than layered on top of stock Android. It organizes the phone’s functions into four groups under the MCP standard, letting Amoo combine communication, apps, files, and system tools into one task. StepFun shipped the on-device Step Edge model family that powers it just a day before unveiling the phone itself.

Is the STEPX Neo Available to Buy Yet?

Not yet. StepFun has not announced a price, release date, or final specs. Industry watchers tracking StepFun’s supply chain expect a possible China launch sometime next year, aimed at the premium price segment rather than a budget device.

What Happened to ByteDance’s Doubao Phone?

ByteDance and ZTE’s Nubia brand launched the first Doubao Phone in December 2025, then scaled back its banking, payment, and gaming features within days after WeChat, Alipay, and Taobao restricted it. A second-generation version is set to debut at WAIC 2026 on July 17, reportedly with up to 15 terabytes of free cloud storage and expanded cross-app operation.

Is Anyone Else Building an AI-Native Phone?

Yes. OpenAI has been developing its own AI hardware, including a rumored phone that targets apps instead of new hardware, though it isn’t expected before 2028. A lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing Apple’s hardware designs has added further uncertainty to that timeline.

Does an Agent-Native Phone Create New Privacy Risks?

Yes. Doubao’s rollout is the clearest example, since banks and superapps could no longer tell whether a tap on screen came from a human or the agent acting for them. A Tsinghua University researcher described the shift as having ‘amplified the privacy paradox in the AI era,’ since one system-level agent now holds data once scattered across separate apps.