China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has released a white paper stating Google platform has too much power over the Chinese smartphone market, while calling for the creation of Chinese smartphone platforms.
According to Business Insider, the white paper praises Chinese companies including Baidu, Alibaba and Huawei for creating their own mobile operating systems, while attacking the control Google has over the Android platform.
“Our country’s mobile operating system research and development is too dependent on Android,” the paper states
“While the Android system is open source, the core technology and technology roadmap is strictly controlled by Google.”
The news has been interpreted by some analysts as suggesting the Chinese government could be looking into regulations around the use of Android on smartphones.
The news also comes as a number of leading vendors in the Chinese market, including ZTE, Alcatel, Huawei, LG and Sony, have backed Mozilla’s Firefox OS smartphone platform.
As SmartCompany recently reported, the low-end market in countries such as China represents a tremendous opportunity for smartphone platforms and manufacturers to grow their marketshare.
As of May last year, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest market for smartphones.
Currently, China has just 22% smartphone penetration in a market with 1.12 billion mobile users.
To put that figure into perspective, there are around 6.7 billion mobile devices including mobile phones and tablets, equating to 94 mobile devices for every 100 people alive on Earth today, with 1.3 billion smartphones in use worldwide.
Meanwhile, according to Canalys figures published by SmartCompany in November last year, Apple holds just 8% of the Chinese market, placing it outside the top five smartphone vendors.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
