Qwen 3.5 Plus (397B) Launches on Chinese App, Signals Major AI Advancement

Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) series has taken a pivotal step forward with the official deployment of Qwen 3.5 Plus (397B-a17b) on the Chinese Qwen mobile application, according to user reports on Reddit’s r/LocalLLaMA community. The model, reportedly available since late February 2026, represents one of the largest open-weight AI systems to be made accessible via a consumer-facing mobile app in China, signaling a strategic shift toward democratizing high-performance AI for everyday users.

While the model’s weights have not yet been publicly released on platforms like Hugging Face, its integration into the Qwen app—available through QR code download as noted on the official Qwen Chat portal—suggests a controlled, ecosystem-driven rollout. The app, designed for mobile optimization, now offers enhanced reasoning, image generation, and multimodal understanding, features previously reserved for cloud-based APIs. According to user observations, the update includes improved contextual memory, faster response times, and refined Chinese language fluency, indicating substantial training on localized datasets.

The Qwen 3.5 Plus builds upon the architecture of earlier Qwen models, including the vision-language variant Qwen-VL, which was presented at ICLR 2024 and demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in image captioning, text localization, and visual reasoning. As detailed in the OpenReview paper, Qwen-VL’s success laid the groundwork for integrating visual and textual understanding into a unified framework. The 397B parameter variant appears to extend this capability, enabling the mobile app to process complex image-text queries with unprecedented accuracy—such as interpreting diagrams, extracting text from screenshots, or generating creative content from visual prompts.

Industry analysts note that this release aligns with China’s broader push to develop sovereign AI infrastructure. Unlike Western counterparts that often restrict large models behind paywalls or API gates, Alibaba’s approach emphasizes direct user access through its proprietary ecosystem. This mirrors the strategy employed by Baidu’s ERNIE Bot and Huawei’s Pangu, but with a stronger emphasis on open-weight deployment within a controlled environment. The absence of public weight releases may reflect regulatory caution or intellectual property strategy, but it does not diminish the model’s impact on local AI adoption.

For developers and researchers, the mobile deployment offers a rare glimpse into the real-world performance of ultra-large models under constrained conditions. Early testers report that the app runs efficiently on flagship Android devices, suggesting optimizations in model quantization and on-device inference—techniques previously associated with smaller models. This could foreshadow a new paradigm where frontier AI models are no longer exclusive to data centers but are accessible on personal devices, raising questions about privacy, latency, and energy efficiency.

Alibaba has not issued an official press release regarding the Qwen 3.5 Plus mobile launch, but the update is visible within the Qwen Chat app interface, which now prominently features a "New Model Available" banner and a redesigned AI assistant persona. The company’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, updated in January 2026, now include clauses addressing on-device AI processing and data anonymization, further indicating preparation for this scale of deployment.

As global AI competition intensifies, the Qwen 3.5 Plus launch underscores China’s growing capacity to innovate in large-scale AI without reliance on U.S.-based cloud platforms. While the model’s full technical specifications remain undisclosed, its integration into a widely used consumer app marks a milestone in the evolution of accessible, high-performance artificial intelligence.