Qwen app (Tongyi)

What it is

The Qwen app, known in Chinese as 千问 App or by its earlier name 通义 (Tongyi), is Alibaba's consumer chatbot. It is built on the company's Qwen models, which means a person can type questions, ask for writing help or get analysis through an app on a phone, while the models behind it are produced by Alibaba's Qwen team within Alibaba Cloud ^[1].

Origins

The product started as a beta of Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023 ^[1]. Alibaba opened it to the public in September 2023, after regulatory clearance ^[1]. The web version, Qwen Chat, hosted new models at launch, including Qwen2.5-Max in January 2025 and QwQ-32B, a reasoning model, in March 2025 ^[2][3].

Main features

The app has grown from a plain chat interface into a gateway to other services. In January 2026 Alibaba updated it to link with the company's broader ecosystem, starting with food delivery. The plan also included integration with Taobao and Fliggy, Alibaba's online shopping and travel platforms ^[1].

Its abilities also expanded with the models. With Qwen3.5, released in February 2026, Alibaba said the model could operate desktop and mobile applications, meaning it could carry out tasks inside software on a computer or phone rather than only answering in text ^[1][4].

Reach is another measure of the product's scale. By May 2026 the Qwen app had 234 million users ^[1].

Its place in development

Within Alibaba, the Qwen app is the consumer face of a model family that also serves developers and companies through open weights and cloud products. In July 2026 it was reported that Qwen would join Apple Intelligence in China, alongside Baidu's Ernie Bot ^[1]. For readers, the progression is the main thing to note: a beta in April 2023, public opening that September, new models hosted on the web version, and then links to shopping, delivery and the ability to operate apps as the underlying models grew more capable.