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