Comment by wodenokoto
8 years ago
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.
8 years ago
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?
No, unless your perceptions of what the average Chinese consumer wants are warped.
Wechat is an app platform, it isn't all the apps.
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