270 Million Android Users In China

An anonymous reader writes "Until now, it was particularly difficult to obtain reliable figures on the results of the Android operating system in China. Indeed, there is no 'centralized app store' and most smartphones sold in the country do not use Google services, including activation. In fact, it is very difficult to know the actual results. The search engine Baidu has corrected this by publishing a report on trends in the mobile internet for the 3rd quarter 2013. It appears that there would be now 270 million active users of the Google platform in the country (more than 20% of the total population). Growth would, however, decrease with a small 13% against 55% for the same period last year but up 10% compared to Q2 2013."

Not that supprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I was browsing this page the other day ...

http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/11/smartphone-market-share-by-country-q3-2013.html#.Uppjs6kW1dU

It seems that the Android market in China has roughly 80% of the market but the surprising thing is the level of iPhones. Some European countries have less iPhone uptake than that.

Android clearly dominates the market outside the US and Australia.

On interesting figure is that in China there are 1.2 billion in China so lots of room for growth as phones come up for replacment.

Re:Almost heaven

[zequav]

Nobody forces you to use the google services with a Nexus, and you can buy one now in USA or Europe. Get AOSP/CM/AOKP/PA/whatever from git, compile it (or get it from xda from someone who compiled it) and voila: (mostly) open source OS with no traces of google. With fdroid replacing the play store, humble indie bundle for some nice games and DAVdroid (available in fdroid) for contact and calendar sync with your own carddav/caldav server you get a nice private smartphone.

Re:Almost heaven

[AmiMoJo]

As of KitKat, Google search cannot be disabled.

Sure it can, it's just part of the default launcher. You can replace the launcher with any type that you want, with or without Google search. There are hundreds available on Play or via side-loading if you want to completely avoid anything Google related.

Re:Almost heaven

[knarf]

Nonsense. The source is there, anything can be disabled, changed, added. The only thing keeping Android from being completely open is the amount of blob code needed to access device-specific hardware. Google has as much control over your phone as you want, from 'none at all' to 'they know who I'm about to meet'. The choice is yours.

The KK launcher ('home screen app') in Google apps is built around Google search. Don't want it? Just use another launcher, there is one for every need, some of them free software, others closed. The choice, again, is yours.