Ant Afu: The Explosive Digital Health App Taking over China

My two cents on the seven-month-old AI app that already boasts 30 million monthly users and processes 10 million health queries per day.

Feb 18, 2026

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🔬This is a Real Diagnosis post at China Health Pulse, where we dive deeper into key topics and current trends.

Stay tuned for my upcoming book on the global impact of China’s biotech and digital health revolution, out in the latter half of this year.

新年快乐! Wishing everyone good health and wellbeing in the New Year of the Horse.

Last week, I was interviewed by Bloomberg News about China’s AI-powered health platform: Ant Group’s Afu 蚂蚁阿福. I thought I would expand on my comments further at China Health Pulse, to break things down for all of you here.

Afu may only be seven months old, but it has already become the most consequential development in China’s digital health landscape of the past few years.

Though I’ve been tracking its impressive growth for some time now, two recent moments finally crystallised for me how fully Afu has evolved from industry innovation to national phenomenon.

The first was last month, when my father, who actively avoids anything to do with health or medicine, but cannot resist a trend, jumped on the bandwagon. Normally the last person to download, let alone advocate for an app like this, he had heard about it from all of his friends, and uncharacteristically began to send screenshots of Afu’s various capabilities to our family WeChat group, entirely unprompted.

The second was cultural, and it came just two days ago, when Afu featured as the central storyline in one of the main comedy skits during CCTV’s 2026 Spring Festival Gala.

For those unfamiliar, this infamous New Year’s Eve broadcast is a annual five-hour holiday extravaganza that can perhaps be described as somewhere between the Super Bowl halftime show and a Christmas Harry Potter film marathon - but on an even greater scale. It is a garishly choreographed and predictably tedious spectacle of music, dance and comedy that nevertheless remains mandatory viewing each year for well over a billion people across China and the global diaspora - endlessly loved, mocked and debated in equal measure.

Having suffered through decades of watching these Galas every new year’s eve, I can confidently attest that I had never seen any health product or topic feature on stage before, let alone so prominently. I found myself suddenly attentive to the show, for the first time in a long time - and certainly not because any of the humourless jokes were entertaining. Afu’s presence on the Gala stage this year signified just how much this groundbreaking platform has moved beyond early adoption or product trend, to firmly enter the mainstream public consciousness of Chinese consumers right across the nation.

A series of mind-boggling numbers back this up. Since launch, Afu has consistently ranked as the most-downloaded medical app on Apple’s China App Store. Roughly 400 million Chinese were already using digital healthcare services, but according to Ant, though it is only still seven months old, it has gained over 30 million monthly active users, who submit over 10 million health-related questions each day.

I’ve written before about China’s AI health landscape, the rise of its internet hospitals, as well as Alibaba’s health strategy (Ant Group’s affiliate parent company and Chinese tech giant - Part 2 of that analysis is still to come).

Afu sits at the intersection of all three threads, but beyond its record-breaking popularity, I am even more interested in what its rise reveals about where China’s health system is heading more broadly. These matter enormously for everyone watching and working in healthcare and technology both inside China and beyond it.

Let’s unpack:

What Afu actually does.
Why this was the platform that took off, and not any other.
The implications of its rise - including for policy, capital, and industry strategy.
Where I think might all head next.