Motorola Takes Android To China, With Or Without Google 42
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."
Competition is good, Dell is already playing (Score:4, Interesting)
Competition with Android in the Chinese marketplace is always a good thing. So far, even if Google doesn't play, Dell is already on the field, and I'm pretty sure HTC is in the game as well.
What does this mean for Android? Good and bad. The good is that it gains exposure in the most up and coming nation in the world, with a lot of people climbing the career ladder from rice paddy to corner office. The bad is that the Android platform ends up more fragmented. Windows Mobile's weakness for a long time was no central app store where one could buy items for the phone, on the phone.
Time will tell though. If Android fragments so much that apps have to be designed to deal with multiple Dalvik VMs, many hardware configurations, and many phones before the app can run, this will hamstring this platform's future. However, if Android apps are compatible to an extent, where it is almost certain that an app downloaded will run, then this might propel Android into a front runner smartphone platform.
Android's competition isn't stopping. Apple's app store "just works" on all iPhone models (unless there is a specific feature like GPS or 3G an older model lacks.) RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft are not standing still either.
Android without Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Android without Google (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
As for the simple solution "make our modifications available to any competitor by open sourcing them", good luck with that.