China's Mobile Giants Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo To Take on Google's Play Store (reuters.com) 17
China's Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo and Vivo are joining forces to create a platform for developers outside China to upload apps onto all of their app stores simultaneously, in a move analysts say is meant to challenge the dominance of Google's Play store. From a report: The four companies are ironing out kinks in what is known as the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA). The platform aims to make it easier for developers of games, music, movies and other apps to market their apps in overseas markets, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The GDSA was initially aiming to launch in March, sources said, although it is not clear how that will be affected by the recent coronavirus outbreak. A prototype website says the platform will initially cover nine "regions" including India, Indonesia and Russia.
Evil hates competition (Score:2)
trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Services Framework (Score:4, Insightful)
Competition is great, sure, except this newfound app store is pretty useless 'cause thousands of apps will not work properly or will not work at all unless they create [straitstimes.com] a viable [ndtv.com] alternative [gizmodo.com] to Google Services Framework, Google Maps and probably other Google services.
Android without Google Services is not exactly a thing you imagined it to be. I can't say whether it's good or bad, it's just what it is: Google Android.
What this announcement could really mean is that the Chinese companies are seeking leverage against the US government and Google. I don't think Google will be happy to lose a tacit monopoly on this huge cash cow - there are just too many people in China to ignore the issue.
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I fail to understand why google maps is such a problem when there are alternatives like waze.
YouTube could be a bigger issue, but I can imagine in countries like China, it could be replaced by others platforms.
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I fail to understand why google maps is such a problem when there are alternatives like waze.
WAZE is owned by Google and I believe it requires Google Services to work. Google has been steadily integrating WAZE features into Google Maps and if their track record is any indication WAZE will be deprecated as soon as they get Maps to parity.
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Google Maps and YouTube are both blocked in China anyway. There are more fundamental things that Google Play Services provides these days, like implementing the location services API itself.
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They are clearly building the background framework to displace two companies Google and M$. They do no want Android either and so they are building an app store for Linux because with Linux they get full market penetration as long as the market is Linux. So Huawei Linux is what will be the big thing for the Global market. They'll probably look to open up a Linux phone to the market to attract a much broader market, not just on the phone but on desktops, servers, TVs, every appliance imaginable. They can not
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There's no reason why they couldn't just use microg. They don't have to create an alternative when it already exists.
And the market fragmentation continues (Score:4, Interesting)
across continental boundaries. Developers can and will flock to as many marketplaces as make it easy for them to make a profit.
US trade actions have prodded the Chinese phone makers to make their own app marketplace that now will likely be included in ALL their handsets. That's 40% of the current market.
Now if they offer a better deal than Google has on the revenue split and there is little or no corruption within the developer revenue stream they may in a few years be eating a nice slice of Google's app revenue.
Google's response is likely to be more and more proprietary content and other lock-in within Android to prevent this erosion of their power. Android will become more locked up like Apple's iOS.
It is likely that China and much of Asia will find Android replaced with a forked version that will diverge from Google's version.
It should be at least fun to watch.
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Only the absolute bottom end of the market is getting fragmented. Apple dominates the top and Android will likely dominate the middle.
China isn't going to give these phones any state based advantage, the US would not take kindly and as has been proven the US has by far the upper hand in negotiations.
Margin wise I foresee less fragmentation going forward in fact. With Apple eating up most of the margin in industry and having so much more to spend on R&D, acquisitions, patent landmining etc it's hard for
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US trade actions have prodded the Chinese phone makers to make their own app marketplace that now will likely be included in ALL their handsets. That's 40% of the current market.
Google has been banned in China for a long long time. All those companies already had their own app marketplaces to serve their own Chinese markets.
The difference now is that they are considering teaming up to expand that into other countries.
Amazing (Score:2)
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Global Censorship Alliance (Score:2)
Our new walled garden features more surveillance, and less rights for you, the filthy prole!
Lots of negative comments...but... (Score:4, Insightful)
This was a predictable action on strictly commercial grounds. Once the US govt acts to cut off access, it becomes extremely important to develop independent sources. Surprise!
As to the political problems, yes, they exist. But how much do people pay attention to analogous problems with the current system? This new system might actually offer better security, unless you are worried about your government spying on you. And if you are, the current system is quite permeable.
This is part of the predictable reactions to cutting of supply chains. Now that it's happened, you've got to live with it. A foreign based business would be foolish to depend on a supply chain that had an essential link in the US...except, possibly, for chains that ended in the US.
This is why "MAGA" isn't a good description of the current international market. More nearly the opposite, though developing the new products takes awhile.
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they used to be so powerful because they had a foot in every door.
Now they concentrate on slamming those doors shut, at times even remebering to withdraw their own foot first.
The rest of the world don't care for their feet, they measure in meters.
But the doors stay shut.