A New Platform?
As the Playstore was banned in China, indigenous players like Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Huawei have made up their own respective app stores, yet running on common versioned Android OS. This makes the app developers go under hefty works to design apps especially for Playstore and other separate Chinese app stores if they wanted to leverage the Chinese user base. This new platform will be developed under the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA), where the developers outside China can upload their apps to relevant app stores all at once. They may make the work of developers easy and quick, as they need not craft the apps especially for Google’s Playstore and others. This isn’t the first time Chinese players have teamed up. Earlier this year, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo have joined together for creating a file-sharing protocol, similar to Apple’s Airdrop. This resulted in creating Mi Share for Xiaomi devices, which uses Bluetooth to connect and Wi-Fi direct protocol for fast P2P sharing. Now, rivalling against Playstore, GDSA sources tell that this new platform will be made available for nine countries initially, which includes India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Russia. Other sources tell that Huawei isn’t involved in this pact, and even the project logos of this platform in the GDSA website has only the logos of Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo only. Further, this platform’s launch is expected to be this by this quarter-end but delayed citing coronavirus outbreak. Source – Reuters
