China’s top smartphone makers Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Vivo have collaborated to build a shared platform to compete with Google’s Play store, latest reports have revealed. The move is believed to be a direct threat to the $1 trillion parent Alphabet company and the de-facto US dominance of Android.
Manufacturers in China rely on Android to run their devices but they use domestic app stores inside China, where Google services are blocked. Chinese manufacturers have continued to reply to pre-installed Google Play, offering the users the most popular social apps like Facebook and WhatsApp that are not available for download in China.
The four Chinese handset makers together shipped around 40pc of the world’s smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2019.
They will now let foreign app developers like Facebook upload and update the software to all the respective stores, through the new platforms, with a single click.
If this initiative materializes successfully, this will create a new universe of apps which will be in direct competition with Google Play Store.
