Android Rises to 90% of Smartphone Market in China

http://www.techinasia.com/android-market-share-china-2012/

by Reltair • 14 years ago

70 49 14 years ago

mtgx• 14 years ago

I think it's the people saying that Android is not the Windows of smartphones that will be considered crazy at this point (unlike before when it was the one saying it who who were considered that).

MaysonL• 14 years ago

Of course, Microsoft made a lot of money selling Windows...

adventured• 14 years ago

And Samsung is making a huge amount of money selling Android with their phones, and those numbers continue to skyrocket.

Google doesn't sell Android of course - they ride it. It's a completely different business model that can't be compared to the business model of selling packaged retail software.

rimantas• 14 years ago

Microsoft also makes money with every Android phone sold.

tomflack• 14 years ago

I don't think it's a helpful comparison to make. The only similarity between the two is the market share - android being open source changes quite a lot.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

Not that much. Most people don't install an OS on their phone other than the one the carrier puts on it. The big differentiator for Windows was that it was an open ecosystem. Anyone could make an app. Anyone could install any app they wanted. Anyone could make a PC, even individuals. And Windows was just the glue holding the ecosystem together. Android seems to be slotting into a similar role for smartphones today.

mathnode• 14 years ago

I have always considered Android, to be Windows 95 for phones. I am a happy Android user.

reedlaw• 14 years ago

Actually the most popular distribution I've seen in China is not vanilla Android but a version called MIUI[1]. So in the sense that Android can be forked, it seems more analogous to Linux than Windows.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIUI

Steko• 14 years ago

It will never be a good analogy because there's nothing equivalent to the effect corporate buyers had in locking in the windows monopoly for decades.

If Apple wants to start selling $100/$200 phones (they dont) there's no "compatibility" barrier stopping people from buying them.

If a new free licensed OS comes out based on some radically innovative tech (mind control? whatever...) those factories won't blink at switching over.

If the Chinese government decides to outlaw Android because the nephew of the Premier runs a competing company/whatever... well some people will complain but most will just buy whatever the next best option is.

Now there's no scenario for Android tanking that seems very likely to happen to me so ... yes I'd expect Android to dominate market share going forward. But that's a huge difference from Windows, a monopoly that didn't care what anyone expected to happen. Resistance was futile.

alpb2• 14 years ago

Interesting that almost none of these devices are shipped with Google Account integration. What does Google get out of this huge market share?

steve19• 14 years ago

What does it cost them? There is no marginal cost for each Android phone shipped. When people upgrade from a cheap non-brand phone to a Samsung or Huawei they will start making money.

tsotha• 14 years ago

They get some influence on the future direction of the technology. China is such a huge market that might be worth quite a bit.

zalew• 14 years ago

> Interesting that almost none of these devices are shipped with Google Account integration.

More interesting (for Google) is that 90% of Chinese people don't buy Windows and iOS phones.

Opensource at its finest and opensource as a defence weapon at the same time.

pretoriusB2• 14 years ago

>More interesting (for Google) is that 90% of Chinese people don't buy Windows and iOS phones.

70% of people in the west doesn't buy Windows (nobody buys Windows phones, period), or iOS phones anyway.

So, it's not much surprise that Android does well in a much poorer market. It always catered mostly to the lower end of the market in the west too.

ars• 14 years ago

> What does Google get out of this huge market share?

A larger ecosystem. People writing android programs for the Chinese market will probably also upload them to Google's stores.

I'm sure lots of the programs will be junk and/or uninteresting in other countries, but the better programs will probably be able to afford localization.

pretoriusB2• 14 years ago

>A larger ecosystem. People writing android programs for the Chinese market will probably also upload them to Google's stores.

Don't bet on it. Most of those will be highly localized, and those people, mainly Chinese, would have to jump through hoops to get them on Google stores for not much benefit.

In fact, Google does not make much, if anything at all from the whole Android thing, Samsung makes a killing though.

j_col• 14 years ago

Eye balls. They're in the advertising business, remember?

alpb2• 14 years ago

Chinese people probably visit Chinese websites, which probably don't have Google Ads?

aphexairlines• 14 years ago

Where does Analysys International get those stats? Are those the same numbers that Alibaba, Taobao, Google, Amazon, etc are seeing in China?

scottchin• 14 years ago

Does anyone have insight into any of the following questions?

1. Which Chinese Android App marketplaces are the most popular? In other words, if I wanted to target Chinese Android users, which app stores should I focus on submitting my app to?

2. Are there any barriers to submitting to such app stores for north american developers? Specifically related to getting paid.

3. Which Android mobile ad networks are best (cpm/cpc) for China?

Would love to hear any personal experiences working with China's Android Market!

athgeo• 14 years ago

A cursory search turned up this thread CSDN => http://bbs.csdn.net/topics/370249613 (CSDN being a popular IT forum in China - another one that you may want to research is iteye.com).

According to the author, paid apps are hard to make money off. It appears advertising is the easiest way to monetize apps. Post '#2' has a list of ad networks. Post '#28' enumerates popular Android markets.

As for your second question, it is probably no problem. You just need to sign up with one of the many Chinese equivalents of Paypal. I'm sure there are then ways you can get the funds transferred to your account.

kevin_p• 14 years ago

#1. For us, the top 3 are GoAPK (anzhi.com), GFan (apk.gfan.com) and Tencent App Center (http://android.myapp.com). Between them, they're >90% of Chinese 3rd-party app store downloads.

#2. The biggest hurdle is that everything is in Chinese. I'm not sure how hard it would be to get paid if you're not in China, but as athgeo says, Chinese users really don't like to buy paid apps - even in the iOS app store our free-to-paid ratio for China is literally 10 times worse than the US, and Android is even worse because the users are less likely to have money. So it's probably best to concentrate on ad-supported apps.

#3. If anyone has good advice on this, I'd like to hear it.

peloton• 14 years ago

Related to this-- Any insight on market share by Android variant?

meaty• 14 years ago

I wonder what the total marketshare that corresponds to is? From what I've read, smartphones are still in a niche in china and they primarily use dumbphones and featurephones.

sien• 14 years ago

There are 40+ million smartphone sales per quarter in China.

http://bgr.com/2012/08/26/china-smartphone-sales-q2-2012-len...

So There are 140+ million Android sales per year in China.

linpythio2• 14 years ago

The android phones chinese bought are very cheap(500yuan to 2,000yuan),and they like free app.They can't afford iphones-5,000yuan(it will be stolen).

lvturner• 14 years ago

This is complete rubbish. In Beijing every second person you walk past is casually using an iPhone.

linpythio2• 14 years ago

I said the whole country,not beijing,shanghai and other big city.Most people in Beijing and shanghai are richer than normal Chinese.

Ygg2• 14 years ago

Bejing, is a subset of China, so it's not a good representation of total population. I bet most of China's population is (still) in rural areas (migrating occasionally to the city).

vidarh2• 14 years ago

Sure about that? You can buy feature-phones for ~$20 from China via Aliexpress.com that mimic iPhone 4's look very closely (including directly copying the UI), as well as a bunch of low end Android phones that also look like iPhone's at slightly higher price.

It also doesn't mesh with income levels, unless you're only walking around in very affluent areas, which is why anecdotes are pretty useless to establish popularity.

barry-cotter• 14 years ago

They can't afford iphones-5,000yuan(it will be stolen).

Not true. I can see a Samsung Note and an iPhone from where I'm standing in a Shanghai metro carriage. All bar one of the Chinese teachers I work with have an iPhone and they make about a third of what I do per month.

Actually that's only at my M-F job. But iPhones are a majority among the Chinese teachers I work with.

And China, or at least Shanghai, is very, very safe. If you're unlucky you may be pickpocketed but you will not be mugged.

seanmcdirmid5• 14 years ago

Or you accidentally leave your iphone in the cab :(

Shanghai is special in china, it's closer to a modern city than anywhere else. iPhone's dominate the high end in Beijing also.

jpdus• 14 years ago

My experience in china was the same as the 2 commenters above... 2 most popular phones you see in Shanghai or Beijing are Galaxy Note (because you can enter chinese signs directly via pen!?) and iPhones!

forgottenpaswrd• 14 years ago

You know about this country in witch death penalty is still applied.

My(western) girlfriend traveled all China ALONE, and she really felt secure. China is probably the safest country on earth.

This probably will change the moment they embrace democracy and focus on the right of the criminals like they do in the west.

freehunter2• 14 years ago

Is your name Hu Jintao?

kalleboo• 14 years ago

> You know about this country in witch death penalty is still applied

The U.S.?

tmister• 14 years ago

Google is at same position as Microsoft, both of them are not earning any money from this large market share. Not to mention about rampant piracy of applications there.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

Let's have some perspective here. Google earns about $40 bil a year, mostly from ads. Microsoft's Windows division still earns $18 billion a year. That part of their business may be in extreme danger at the moment but the only place where $18 billion is a rounding error is the government.

cs702• 14 years ago

Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital foresaw Android's rise, and wrote an excellent essay about it in early 2011, "The Freight Train That Is Android."[1] His main point: Google is not trying to make a profit on Android; they're trying only to control the key layers between themselves and the consumer, by making these layers free or even less than free, which is a HUGE problem for Android's competitors, who must make a profit.

As he put it, "I don’t know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to 'win' in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don’t need economics. Imagine if Ford were faced with GM paying people to take Chevrolets? How many would they be able to sell? What if you received $0.10 for every free Pepsi you consumed? Would you still pay $1.50 for a Coke?"

I highly recommend you read (or re-read) Bill's prescient essay.

[1] http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-an...

stcredzero• 14 years ago

Google could also be said to be "commoditizing the complement."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

IBM did this with Java development and Sun. (Eclipse - note what the name does to the Sun.)

freehunter2• 14 years ago

I'm really worried about Google's potential for an anti-trust lawsuit. Giving away free phones, destroying profit margins on competitors, and using those users to increase marketshare in other areas they dominate seems incredibly risky to me. Having a majority share of mobile phones for free or less than free, tied into Google's SaaS services that can be used for free and using them to increase reliance on Google services that are made profitable by their tight vertically integrated ad solutions worries me.

I like Google. I don't want to see them turn a late 90's Microsoft because they started to overreach. Dumping is not a good strategy for flying under the FTC's radar. Can anyone put my fears to rest?

Android Rises to 90% of Smartphone Market in China

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