“Google is not faring well in China due to the government’s restrictions,” Star Chang reports for M.I.C. Gadget. “Now the Great Firewall of China has blocked the Android Market, the online app store for Android smartphone users.”
“This is not the first time that Android Market was blocked in China, it had happened once before in 2009,” Chang reports. “For the Android users in China, they only have an option to use other local app stores.”
MacDailyNews Take: Save the effort, Android settlers: Just email your bank account numbers directly to the Chinese mafia.
Chang reports, “[This] is something that Google definitely does not appreciate, already the search giant is facing tough competition to have its own place in China due to its local search rival, Baidu. Google also faces a severe deficit of trust with the Chinese government… We won’t know what is the cause behind the block, the only guess might be the Chinese authorities are dishing out more ‘punishment’ to Google. Google should worry about missing out on the lucrative business of selling mobile apps in China.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It seems that Google’s pretend App Store for their pretend iPhones is just going to have to pretend to be open in the world’s second largest economy.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
If Google is so open, why not make its Android Market HTML5-based and iPhone-compatible?
“If Google is so open, why not make its Android Market HTML5-based and iPhone-compatible?”
You missed the news on Cnet that Android apps will be able to run on the iPad with a new iPad app to be announced next week.
IMHO that means an Android user can switch and bring his investment in Android with him.
Google fanboys want it to read that no one need write an iOS app anymore as anyone can now run Android everywhere so write only Android apps for a living
Its not going to work either way sadly.
Originally Alien Dalvik was running as a native sandbox on the iPad.
Now they are running it in “the cloud” and basically you can’t install your apps. You can get apps from them (their own market) but the performance blows since you are basically running something like Remote Desktop to run the Android App.
You can’t move your apps over (unless you want to get them from the other market) and its not going to be a way to release one app for iPhone/iPad/Android.
Its a non-starter in my mind.
This is obviously retaliation for Google’s 2010 accusation that Chinese agents hacked into the Gmail accounts of government critics.
Without the Android app market (store), Android-based phones won’t sell nearly as well in China. That opens the door for iPhones (yay!) and also invites HTC, Samsung and others to adopt Microsoft’s Windows 7 mobile operating system.
Given the enormous size of the Chinese smartphone market, this ban constitutes a huge blow to Android’s momentum.
Not to mention the various forks of the Android code base made by a number of Chinese phone manufacturers, particularly Baidu.
Asians are very into this tit for tat business, it’s about saving face and one of the more embarrassing traits of a culture that doesn’t fit modern society. But we’ll keep buying chinese goods until their powerful enough to be a significant threat to us all.
?
China became a “significant threat” to us all over 40 years ago.
The day American (and other) consumers decided “cheap is best, no matter how bad we hurt ourselves”, it was Game Over.
I recall a night, many years ago during a RimPac exercise in Hawaii, a Japanese sailor telling “Americans are stupid” for buying their cars.
Very few people in Japan would have bought American cars (or other products, even if they had been vastly superior in every category), because they knew how badly they’d be shooting themselves in the face later down the road.
@ moo: well said.
In a half century of coasting and brainwashing, US citizens _in general, on average_ have become dumb “consumers” and not creators. The walmartization of the American economy continues because Americans have decided to be too lazy to make or repair anything anymore. They engage in partisan politics and point the blame in all directions but at themselves. Politicians are the problem, each will claim, but reality is that personal debt is a even bigger problem that federal debt by far. What’s even worse is they have developed an entitlement attitude to go with it. Clearly not the signs of a lasting economic superpower.
Don’t count on the Chinese to be our friends. If we want to maintain a high standard of living, we have to fend for ourselves — and yes, that means reinvesting in American manufacturing, something not even Apple has been kind enough to do.
Amen, spoken like a true American!
The Chinese have the money to build up their military capability (no, I’m not a fan of China). The US is bankrupt and it would be sheer stupidity to still throw money and resources and send their fleet and airpower to police the oceans and sky where the world has already lost respect for American weakness. The fact is still true from ancient times to the modern age: Money is power. The US loses its mandate because it mismanages its economy and fritter away its fortune recklessly.
So are you saying Americans do the same thing as Japanese Americans should buy American products regardless of quality?
Japanese don’t buy American products because there are so many barriers and tariffs for american (foreign) products to be told in Japan. So they are expensive and in low numbers in Japan in most cases. However apple mobile products sell very well in Japan certain other non-japanese products do well in japan too like fashion brands etc. . Also Japanese often look down on each other if they buy foreign products like car etc.
@ ban6dit:
Nobody is suggesting buying inferior quality. Exactly the opposite. Take a page from Germany. They know they will never compete with China on price. So they innovate like hell to make their manufacturing more precise, more efficient, and more high tech, more green. They produce high-value products with less resource use. It results in many good-paying manufacturing jobs in Germany because not everyone wants to be a doctor or attorney. But in the USA, corporations have outsourced mfg so dramatically that underemployment is a serious problem. And who’s graduating the greater percentage of science graduates, the USA or China? We can innovate or we can outsource our prosperity. It really is that simple. Sadly, our corporatocracy has chosen the latter economic model. Modern Rome has been burning for 50 years, and only now are citizens starting to feel the heat.
oh f**k CCP! they are a bunch of pussies.
I don’t trust Google for a second but the Chinese government?!? C’mon! They’re transparently propping up / protecting Baidu because they can control them. Google is actually the lesser evil here…believe it or not.
It’s not as if Google is being all that friendly to Chinese programmers. AFAIK they still have not yet rolled out payments in RMB so that programmers there who wish to profit from Android have to deal with complicated foreign exchange issues. Moreover the hardliners in the government are now ensconced in the ministries that oversee media content including the Internet and they continue to take draconian measures to block a wide variety of content they deem “injurious” to the public good, including famously local attempts to create a science fiction series involving time travel. Very likely some of the content (porn? politics?) in the Android marketplace was deemed unacceptable hence leading to the ban. These are dark days for freedom of speech in China generally, so the ban may not be so specifically targeted at Google as some here assume.
You have to wonder what the deal is for Apple to be allowed to be operational and keep being operational in China.
Yes, the Chinese love Apple and their brand, but if the Chinese want access to users me.com emails or access to Macs & iPhones etc, would Apple allow this?
and yet Baidu is a total ripoff of the google page…the irony aahah
Surprisingly while Baidu is a conceptual ripoff of Google, it actually works and gives useful search results, unlike Google, which in all three East Asian languages (C/K/J) tends to put out page after page of irrelevant pdfs and the like. Their whole page rank algorithm seems to have trouble with Asian languages. So even when Google isn’t blocked, my Chinese friends use it mostly for western language searches and use Baidu for Chinese ones.
i believe it.
i tryed to use it but my chinese is bad as my russian…i.e none what so ever lolol. It looks like Baidu is a dedicated search engine for chinese community, wont they control the results?
You’re both sort of right. The government won’t life a finger in favor of nationalist (pshhaw…it’s a joke around here) without a good bribe. Now that both Alibaba and Baidu have their Android forks ready, they bribe the government to shut down the competition, just like they shut down Facebook.
Also, strangely, all the Google services (webpages) are blocked in China, and even the WordPress entry (my blog and MDN) are malfunctioning. I switched on VPN just to enter this comment. :S
Two things:
“lucrative business of selling mobile apps in China”
First, there is no “lucrative business” of selling mobile apps for the retailer.
Second, this is not tit for tat. This is China typically restricting the foreign option, in order to promote the local one.
Android Market is not about selling Apps.. hehehe 😉 We all know that
If it’s not tit-for-tat, why didn’t China ban the sale of Apple apps as well?
Who gives a f***!?!?
Well that answers the question of what the Chicoms have done good today.
I would buy American, but it is hard to find anything made in America anymore. That is the real problem, not that Americans are too lazy to make or repair anything. It is the corporations that like it or not, make available our choices for purchase. And all about the bottom line and cheap labor. How can you compete here while somebody in china makes 10 cents an hour?
Ahem, so what’s the difference to iTunes? I can’t download the updates without having the VPN on. MDS works but loads very slowly and if I open the articles in new taps they will not work without VPN.
CCP is hard at work trying to kill the Chinese culture, it’s the biggest enemy to their ideology. They think that making everybody rich by letting them own an overpriced apartments works, but I’m pretty sure when the bubble bursts hell will break loose. The Chinese have only two operating modes, calm or fury, and what can you do if the fury mode switches on, bring the army with guns? Are you sure you want to give the soldiers ammunition, you don’t know which side they are on when they will be out numbered by 100 to 1.
Blocking Android Market is one of the many ways to delay Arab Spring or ‘US Fall’ from coming here.
You mean MacDailyNews “MDN” not “MDS”?? At least I have the same problem, no matter how many times I hit the reload the page will not load.
At today’s Pro Audio Expo one big boss said: “Chinese are trying their best to keep the foreign tourists away by blocking the net, and looks like they are having quite a success. Even you see a lot companies showing their equipment lot of them never get used if sold. China just doesn’t have it’s own culture to attract audiences. History they have plenty, but that doesn’t help, too low tech you see”.
So yes, Android Market is just one of the tools to try to isolate China again from the rest of the world. What a government, keep doing it and US manufacturing gets back on its feet.
I would have thought the Chinese authorities would welcome a new and self funded way to control the masses