Top Ten App Stores in China

Everyone knows that the Chinese smartphone market is big, it is in fact the largest smartphone market in the world accounting for 32.8% of the overall smartphone sales. If you are an independent Android developer you should be looking at the Chinese market as a source for additional downloads for your apps.

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The Chinese Android app ecosystem differs from the Western app ecosystem in one very important way: Google Play does not dominate. In fact, there is no one dominant app store thanks to the Great Firewall of China blocking Google play. Instead of one app store what you have are literally hundreds of different app stores vying for consumers attentions.

As a developer you do not need to upload your app to every single app store, instead targeting the top ten or so stores will get you access to most Chinese Android handsets. If you are not fluent in Chinese getting into a Chinese App Store can be a little difficult. Over the next few weeks I want to look at how to sign-up for developer accounts at a few of the major Chinese app stores and how to release your apps into those app stores.

For now here is a list of the top ten app stores in China (well eleven) and links to their developer pages. The ranking data comes from NewZoo.com but I added AppChina in at the bottom along with TaoBao since Google Play really isn’t interesting for our purposes:

  1. 360 Mobile Assistant
  2. Tencent MyApp
  3. Biadu Mobile Assistant
  4. Xiaomi App Store
  5. Wandoujia
  6. HiMarket
  7. 91 Mobile Assistant
  8. Anzhi Market
  9. HiSpace – Huawei App Store
  10. AppChina.com
  11. Taobao Mobile Assistant

If you like graphs as much as I do here’s another smartphone sales graph you will find interesting:

Photo by: charlesarthur
Photo by: charlesarthur

2015 Tech Predictions Part 2

Here is part two of my 2015 tech predictions. If you have not already checkout part one.

Now on with part two, starting with:

The Oculus Rift will not revolutionize anything

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I feel like I’m missing something when it comes to the new hype that surrounds Virtual Reality technology. A lot of smart people think that it we be revolutionary, but whenever I think of a VR headset I think of something that I don’t want to wear on my head.

Maybe I feel this way because I came of age during the first round of VR hype and saw how badly that failed because the basic technology really wasn’t there and because it became apparent that we didn’t want everything to be a “virtual” copy of the real world. (Unless we approach holodeck levels of VR I’m looking at you Star Trek and far away from you Lawnmower Man) Maybe we’ve solved the first hurdle, but until the tech is in Star Trek league I’m not sure that we will solve the second.

For those that want to say that you have to try it to believe it, I did try the Oculus Rift DK 1 was wasn’t that impressed.

Gaming? Sure. Training? Maybe. Revolution? Nope.

Big Bold Prediction: Facebook’s $4 Billion purchase of Oculus will start to look like a mistake by the end of the year when the Oculus Rift fails to deliver on the hype.

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The Chinese app market(s) will grow in importance

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The Chinese smartphone market is the largest smartphone market in the world, which means that the Chinese app market is equally massive and in 2015 app developers in the west will really take notice. We will see more developers (including independents) treat the Chinese market as being equal to, or almost equal to Google Play in terms of targeting importance.

We will start seeing more developers targeting one or more of the many Chinese app stores with their apps, and when they do they will also start integrating Biadu, Weibo, and other Chinese API’s into their apps destined for China in the same way that they currently integrate Google, Apple, or Twitter services now for the western market.

Note: The Chinese market, mostly from it’s many ASOP Android devices (versions of the Android OS that lack Google Services including Google Play) and the blocking by the Chinese government of many western software platforms/services (most of Google’s including an outright blocking of Google Play this year) means that the Chinese market is much different than the western market.

Big Bold Prediction: A Services ecosystem will arise to help western developers release their apps in China.

Microsoft will fail to capture the consumer imagination (again)

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I feel a bit mixed about this prediction, I mean I think it’s right, but I also think that with it being Stacha Nadella’s first full year as a CEO we might see some really interesting things coming out of Microsoft in 2015. One the other hand, Microsoft has never been very good at capturing the consumer’s imagination, so the prediction stands.

Microsoft will release Windows 10 in 2015 and we might see a big uptake from the Enterprise world which, by and large, skipped the much maligned Windows 8 release and stuck with Windows 7. (The Windows 8 press was so bad Microsoft skipped version 9 just to distance themselves from it.) But I don’t see everyday consumers caring any more. I don’t think they ever really cared about Windows to be honest, it just happened came on the PC that they bought, or it was the same as what they used at work.

Nowadays most people browse Facebook on the couch with their smartphone (while watching TV) leaving their PC to gather dust in the basement, which means that Windows 10 won’t interest them that much.

We might be do for a home computer upgrade cycle, and the timing of the Windows 10 release might allow Microsoft to post some good consumer numbers (but I don’t really think so) but the magic for the general public is gone (and I would argue that it wasn’t really there in the first place).

In addition to all that Microsoft remains a distant third place in the mobile race. An also ran, not from lack of trying or innovation, and I don’t see them gaining any ground on smartphones any time soon. In fact my far out prediction was them dropping Windows Phone itself.

Big Bold Prediction: Microsoft will sell less copies of Windows 10 in the first three months of release then they did of Windows 8. It will be more popular with the press and get better reviews, but the “consumer desktop” ship has sailed and that means fewer sales for Microsoft.

Extra Note: If Microsoft does deliver a well reviewed version of Windows in Windows 10 it will go a long way to helping the brand with enthusiasts, which is important in the long run, even if it doesn’t boost short-term sales.

Bonus Round

Here are some off the wall predictions that I don’t really think will come true but I wouldn’t be totally surprised if they did:

Xiaomi’s app store will crack the west

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Xiaomi’s Mi App Store will be the first Chinese app store to crack the western markets. They have a popular brand outside of China and Hugo Barra’s past credentials will go a long way to assuring potential users that Xiaomi’s app store is safe.

Google Glass will be taken off the market

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Given the public criticism and the decline in developer and consumer support Google glass will quietly drop off of Google Play and fade in history. (Perhaps as a product ahead of it’s time?)

End of Part two

That’s it for part two, I’m not sure if there will be a part three or not. If I do find the time I’d like to cover the Internet of Things and hardware a little bit, which I think will be a big deal in 2015. We are also planning on covering 2015 predictions on The Incoherent Podcast so stay tuned for episode five, where I will probably go over these predictions and maybe go a little bit deeper.

The Chinese App Market Project…Paused?

So the Chinese App Market Project has paused for the moment. I’ve made some strides in this area but I’ve also switched jobs after spending 14 years with my previous employer. The job switch has forced me to learn another language (C#), which I have been doing in what little spare time I have.

There have also been a series of non-super-serious family incidents that have taken up more of my time. Maybe this is what life is like when you have a family with two small children: moving from one small crisis to the next, then it’s 10:30 pm and all you want to do is have a beer on the couch or go to bed.

I have also found that I have been nurturing a more holistic appreciation of the tech world lately. I feel that this is an expansion of my previous perspective. I feel that in the past I was very much concerned with the nuts and the bolts of tech, and lately (while still being concerned with bolts) I’ve found myself appreciating the larger perspective. Trying to look at the system as a whole to develop a greater understanding of all its many parts, and thinking about how this will play out in the future.

For the moment it’s all mobile for me. I can’t get away from the fact that for the foreseeable future all signs seem to point to mobile taking over more and more of the world. Cheaper hardware, the way we work shifting based on mobile (think about how the PC or the web changed your job). What was your job like 25 years ago before everyone was using a PC? How did it change 15 years ago when the web took off? How will mobile change the way you work? This is what I spend my walks thinking about.

The Chinese App Market Project

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Introduction

If you follow me on twitter, read the few posts on this blog, or if you know me in real life then you know that I am quite interested in the Chinese app market. You can read the reasons for this interest in my Some thoughts on Mobile post. In short the main reasons for my interest are the numbers of people using Android in China (largest smart phone market in the world) and the way in which the ecosystem developed, mainly without Google Play as the central and de facto app store.

I decided to try to learn more about the Chinese app market in the same way that I had taught myself different programming languages and techniques in the past: pick a project and try to build it. I’ve always found that I learnt the most when I actually had a goal in mind and then worked towards it. In this case it is a bit different, in order to learn about the Chinese market I will try to introduce one of my apps into the market and try to reach a certain level of success.

The Goal

In Short:

Make $30.00 in a one month period via AdMob in China. Or (if it is possible to track) get more than 1000 downloads within China

Both goals are not that crazy, but wanted to set something that was attainable given that I am trying to do this in my spare time and I’m not really sure what is possible given legal and cultural differences. I chose to go for a money target as my first goal since I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to track the installs properly within China, and I will need to learn more about which analytics APIs work within the great firewall of china.

Please keep in mind that I do not speak Chinese in any way shape or form. I only speak English and a wee little bit of Canadian French, so I will be relying on Google Translate for much of this project.

The App

To try to achieve this goal, I chose my latest app illuminate. This was the my latest app, and because of my interest in localized markets (including China) I was careful to put all of my strings in string resource files for easy localization.

illuminate is monetized with AdMob ads (banners and interstitials) and was first released on January 25th, 2014. Up until the initial writing of this post on May 4th, 2014 it has only made $1.47 within China. This low number wasn’t that surprising given that it was not translated into Chinese and was only available within Google Play and the Samsung App store.

The First Steps

The first step was obvious: translation, so I bit the bullet and got the strings translated into simplified Chinese via the Google App Translation Service. The translation cost less than $15.00 for both the store listing and the in-app strings and was ready in a couple of days. I was really impressed with the service and if this works I will use it again.

I then uploaded the app to Google Play, Samsung’s app store, Amazon app store, and the 1mobile app store may 4th, 2014. I chose to add 1Mobile because I heard that it did well in China. I also used a localized direct download on this blog (http://selsine.com/美图饰-把文字加到图像上/) because I had heard that direct app downloads are also popular in China. Illuminate is also listed on Xiaomi’s app store: http://app.xiaomi.com/detail/59840 but this was version 1.0.7 taken from Google Play and I’m not sure if it will be updated with the latest translated version.

FYI: 美图饰-把文字加到图像上 is the translated name of the app: 美图饰 comes from “illuminate” and means “Mito Ornaments” or “Beauties Ornaments”, I honestly don’t really know what mito means or why it was translated like that but I put blind faith in the translation company and have assumed that it makes sense locally. 把文字加到图像上 comes from “text on phones” and means “The text added to the image”. I added that last bit (Text on photos) to my store listing to give people an idea of what an app titles illuminate would be for.

I also setup a weibo (often known as the Chinese twitter) account and tweeted or weibo’d out the link to my app a few times.

The next Steps

Now that I have the app translated my next step will to try to get the app listed on some popular Chinese app stores. I have heard that some Chinese app stores will take apps from Google Play and automatically listen them, but I can’t say for certain that this will happen. As I succeed or fail at this project I will track my progress on this blog.

Until next time!