Comment by seanmcdirmid
8 years ago
WeChat has done that to some degree. Given that WeChat is basically a platform at this point, one could imagine a WeChat phone coming out in china, bypassing Android completely. Not sure what would be the point though.
A wechat phone would be obvious and I don't know why they don't do it. Remember that Google play and all the other play services are not available in China.
Because not having Play Store != not running Android apps. People's games and other apps still need Android to run. A non-Android Wechat phone would fail for the same reason Windows phones did -- no apps.
but isn't Wechat basically all the apps?
2 replies →
Maybe because it's too risky.
Alibaba wants to do that once, they made a phone[0] (in Chinese) and a operating system called YunOS[1] which forked on Android.
However, that phone was not a success. So eventually they cooperated with phone manufacturers in China to build phones that have YunOS pre-installed rather than build a phone on their own.
After seeing sale counter of those phones[3] (Also in Chinese) though, I don't think they had a lots of fans.
[0] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%98%BF%E9%87%8C%E4%BA%91%E6%... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yun_OS [2] https://yunos.tmall.com/p/rd169008.htm
I think google play is a available, just nothing else is. Anyways, there are plenty of alternatives.
https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-Play-in-China-function
Aren't Android phones in China already shipping without the Google Play store? So I see them as rivals to the Google Android ecosystem.