Motorola Takes Android To China, With Or Without Google

An anonymous reader writes "Google's spat with China could affect Motorola as it vies to crawl back into the mobile market, but recent partnerships will allow it to pursue the Chinese mobile market alone. Circumventing the fallout, Motorola on Thursday introduced its own Android app store for China and a deal with Baidu, the leading search provider in China."

Re:Android without Google

[Jeeeb]

Google would be able to "diverge" its Android OS from the modifications made by the mobile phone operators - this would force them to rewrite their modifications from a version of Android to another, or to start back-porting into the version of Android they started with any change Google made.

Why would handset makers care about google "diverging" it's modifications? It's not like handset makers have exactly been known to care about keeping users up to date with the latest version. They could just take a snap shot of the Android code base make all the modifications they need and then run with it.

Android != Google

[salesgeek]

Analysts still don't get that Android is no longer owned by Google. It is now owned by the Open Handset Alliance [openhandsetalliance.com].

Re:Competition is good, Dell is already playing

[sabernet]

However, Android being an open source Linux based OS, they'll just take it, change it and call it "Red Robot" or something with different PIMs then default(though, being China, likely direct ripoffs with the G logo changed to a Chinese flag). This won't affect its ability to be marketed in China at all.