Z Finance reports exclusively that Lin Xi, a core member of ByteDance's AI hardware team Ocean and the hardware product lead for its Doubao smartphone, has recently left the company. He's the first senior hardware executive to depart since ByteDance launched its AI phone project in 2024.
Before joining ByteDance, Lin Xi spent years at Huawei's consumer division, where he led hardware development for the Huawei Pura X, the company's wide-format foldable phone. The Pura X launched in March 2025 and sold over 1.5 million units in its first year, helping Huawei capture 71.8% of China's foldable phone market.
Lin Xi joined ByteDance in 2026, joining the Ocean team and reporting directly to Kayden (Liu Chengcheng), Ocean's head and former founder of the tech media outlet 36Kr. The Ocean team, in turn, reports to Zhu Jun, who heads the Flow business unit. Ocean is tasked with executing ByteDance's core AI-plus-hardware strategy.
ByteDance's first Doubao phone was an ODM (original design manufacturer) product from ZTE, appearing as the Nubia M153 engineering unit. It pitched system-level AI features like global memory and screen awareness. In testing, the Doubao phone assistant could automate cross-app tasks — but it quickly ran into anti-bot defenses from major apps, lacking the necessary system-level permissions.
To reclaim control over the device, ByteDance began pushing from pure application-layer work into deeper system reconstruction and tighter hardware supply chain integration. But with Lin Xi's departure, the company once again faces a brain drain in hardware. Over the past few years, several hardware executives absorbed through acquisitions — including Wu Dezhou from Smartisan, Zhou Hongwei from PICO, and Li Haoqian from Oladance — have either left or struggled to integrate.