Due to the differences it had with the policies of the Chinese government, Google has mostly left the Chinese market in 2010. Now it attempts to get back in business in China by launching a special version of its Play store in the country, in an attempt to find its way back to the billion-user emerging market, The Wall Street Journal writes.
App makers for Google’s mobile operating system Android were told of a possible launch of a new app store in China, helping them distribute their apps in a more efficient and targeted way, two people cited by the WSJ have claimed. Google itself declined to comment on the news. As Google is not present on the Chinese markets, local users have several alternatives they can use to purchase their Android apps – some of them not quite on the right side of the law. Many local developers are forced to deal with this phenomenon by having entire teams manage their relationships with these alternative app stores, that obviously cost them extra money. In the US there are only two major stores (and a minor one) to handle – the Apple App Store, the Google Play store and the Windows Store (this is the minor one, of course, ignored by many app developers).
According to the WSJ, Google will try to bring order to the chaos of the Chinese app market by releasing its special version of the App Store, offering a “single entry point through which Android apps could be distributed”. The efforts are still in an early stage, and face significant obstacles, the WSJ writes. One of these will be the local competition – Google will enter a market dominated by its competitors for years, some of them heavy players. The market itself is heavily populated, making it harder to find one’s way./ Will it be worth it? Sure it will – China is the country with the highest number of mobile subscribers in the world, and a significant share of their handsets are smartphones running Google’s own operating system.