270 Million Android Users In China 44
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."
Almost heaven (Score:2)
> there is no 'centralized app store' and most smartphones sold in the country do not use Google services, including activation.
Get this on this side of the Big Pond and I'll sign up in a heartbeat.
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www.dealextreme.com
You're welcome
Re: Almost heaven (Score:1)
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Get this on this side of the Big Pond and I'll sign up in a heartbeat.
Sign up?
Just but the phone. No "signing up" needed.
Re:Almost heaven (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Almost heaven (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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The only thing keeping Android from being completely open is the amount of blob code needed to access device-specific hardware.
This is no small barrier. To end users, it is the difference between a phone that works, and one that is broken. Reverse-engineering proprietary blobs is a tremendous bother. Who wants to put in all that effort for a phone that will be obsolete in 3 months? Essentially, if there is even one proprietary blob, the whole thing is effectively proprietary. From a practical perspective, is only marginally more open than Windows ever was.
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Actually, a modern Android phone (non-Chinese version) is actually full of closed source at the top - and I'm not talking about drivers, but Google-installed closed source.
AOSP g
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Please explain what you mean by "As of KitKat, Google search cannot be disabled". Disabled where? On the home screen? Yes it can. Google now? Yes it can be disabled. In Chrome? How about installing Firefox or Dolphin or one of dozens of other browsers?
I think you have no idea what you are talking about.
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I don't know what you are talking about really but no one forces you to use Google services with any android device. Adding a google account is optional, and there are several app stores available.
Not that supprising (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Growth may be not be that great as your stats also show the population has recently shrunk by 150 million.
Re: Not that supprising (Score:4, Interesting)
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Even though a iPhone 5s costs more than the average monthly wage in China they're still selling out in hours. Can't ask for better sales than that, the fact anyone spends a month's salary is amazing, that would be like what, $3,000 in the US?
The link you provided doesn't give exact sales numbers, but it is a fairly common tactic to limit the supply of expensive items artificially to keep them expensive and exclusive. iPhones are aspirational purchases, if they were cheap and plentiful it would take the shine off.
As for costing more than the average monthly salary that's because there is even bigger disparity of wealth in China than in the US. A friend of mine works in a clothes shop over there and some of the dresses she sells are more than a m
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The link you provided doesn't give exact sales numbers, but it is a fairly common tactic to limit the supply of expensive items artificially to keep them expensive and exclusive. iPhones are aspirational purchases, if they were cheap and plentiful it would take the shine off.
Sure, many companies play the "limit the supply" game, but given that the WSJ [wsj.com] says that they've increased production of the iPhone 5s, I don't think that Apple is playing this game.
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Limiting supply also means scalping, and Apple is against scalpers - a lot of their purchase policies are basically enacted to foil scalpers (it doesn't always work, because if you're willing to throw people at the problem...).
It's far less likely that Apple is artificially limiting supply - the iPhone has traditionally sold for
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If a device uses android, but doesn't use google's services and doesn't use google's app store, it got nothing to do with google.
Why not? The Android operating system is still created and maintained by Google.
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the android OS itself is created by lots of companies and maintained by google
but at this point anything of monetary value in android has been stripped out by google and runs under google play services which is licensed separately. you can create all the non-google android phones you want but unless you pass OHA cert you can't run google apps on them
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It's not Windows if you use Firefox, Google, Open Office and Eclipse instead of IE, Bing, Word and Visual Studio?
If Microsoft has open sourced Windows recently and I missed the news then yes, it wouldn't necessarily be a Microsoft platform.
Windows WILL be opensourced (Score:2)
It's only a matter of time and who knows what restrictive GPL-incompatible license Microsoft will come up with. Everything's being opensourced, including guns, money, and government secrets. Note that I don't equate opensource with free as in freedom. Microsoft will still be in control so that maybe you can't mix Windows source with Android/Linux source. And you'll probably still need to pay a license while all your improvements will belong to them.
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Sure it is.
A platform is a stack such as LAMP. The kernel, OS, and apps, and last use are part of that platform. Windows is just one piece.
Slashdotters keep getting into the argument of whether Android is Linux. I argued no as Linux applies gnu/Linux with an xorg, shell script, unix whatever app. Android is a Linux kernel with a java based proprietary stack on top. Otherwise I am a VMS operator because I run XP at work with a VMS like kernel or a BSD admin because I work on Avaya phones which run on NetBSD.
NSA backdoors Heaven (Score:1)
Imagine how hard Google, Cisco, M$ and others must be pressed to put backdoors in their products.
It's like having "swiss cheese" of networking, so many holes.
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Why would you think so? Not a lot of Americans in China at the moment. NSA is mostly interested in spying on US citizens.
What app markets should I upload my app to? (Score:1)
Some friendly users translated my free (open source) app to Simplified Chinese.
Where should I upload the APK to reach most of the Chinese market? What 2-3 app markets are the most popular in China? Thanks a lot!
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Don't bother - someone else in China probably already has. And maybe even charge for it, and a couple of versions probably have added malware as well.
Quality control, piracy (both ways - paid apps for free in the store, and other devs submitting the same app and making money off it), etc., are non-ex