China too reliant on Android says report; solution is to switch to another platform

With Android's market share in China above 80%, a White Paper report published by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology suggests that the country lessen its reliance on Google's open source OS and switch to other platforms like Windows Phone, Tizen, and Firefox OS. China is one of the biggest smartphone markets in the world and home to the world's largest carrier, China Mobile.

China’s Academy of Telecommunication Research under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also suggested that some of the country's top mobile companies like Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE and Coolpad, and Internet service providers Alibaba and Baidu, develop their own mobile OS for smartphones. However, Taiwan based industry sources in the handset supply chain said that it is too late for these firms to develop its own OS because it takes three to five years for a nascent OS to become competitive, making it too late to compete in the mobile OS business.

One solution offered by the report was for the Android to release some of its regulations so that the country can build an operating system using a variant of Android. Another solution would be for Chinese companies to provide "rich mobile services" and develop mobile apps based not just on Android, but also iOS and Windows Phone.

source: DigitTimes