Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) partnered with Quixey to power its app search and deep search for its mobile operating system, YunOS. Quixey is U.S. based search engine for apps. The firm announced the partnership during Alibaba’s World Developer Conference.
Alibaba’s objective
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) aims to establish itself as the first, true mobile search option in China. To realize its objective, Quixey will power the main search interface for millions of YunOS users.
The Chinese e-commerce giant launched its YunOs mobile operating system in mid-2011. Although the number of smartphone users has been rapidly increasing in China, YunOS failed to gain significant market share in the Chinese smartphone market. Smartphones are the primary devices used by Chinese users to access the internet.
Kiranjeet, Kaur, an analyst at IDC, YunOS smartphone market share in the country was below 1% over the past quarter. Kaur said, “There are just a handful of vendors bringing phones using this OS, and those too are not very well known ones.” The analyst added that Android, the mobile operating system of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOG) still dominates the Chinese smartphone market.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) is expected to announce new details regarding YunOS and a new phone.
Quixey brings AppURL to Alibaba’s YunOS
Under its partnership with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA), Quixey will serve as the only app-related search provider for YunOS. Analysts at Bernstein recently noted that the Chinese e-commerce giant was pushing mobile app adoption by offering discounts of subsidies to advertisers.
According to Quixey, its AppURL will become the official linking standard in China. AppURL was part of the developer program launched by the firm in China. The developer program was part of its initiative to establish a global network of developers working to bring deep search to apps and users. It gives developers access to a Q score, which shows the performance of their apps in search.
Quixey CEO Tomer Kagan said, “There are millions of apps, with millions of functionalities and billions of pieces of content and people have no idea what’s out there. As a user, I don’t want to pick an app to search. I should be able to search all my apps from the same place every time. That’s what we’re bringing to YunOS.”
Quixey hopes to grow its user base in China through its partnership with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA), according to its COO Guru Gowrappan. He added that the firm is to become the common mobile search platform in the country and it is open to creating partnerships with other Chinese companies.
