Chinese Devs Can Now Offer Paid Apps To Google Play Users

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Google Play now allows Chinese developers to offer paid apps. This move is big as it now allows developers from this country to sell their apps to over 130 other countries around the world. Unfortunately, China won’t be able to sell apps in its own country as Google Play isn’t available in China.

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) has a rather troubled relationship with China as the latter tends to block many of the country’s services. Chinese consumers have to download their Android apps from other sources such as Tencent Holdings Ltd (HKG:0700) (OTCMKTS:TCEHY) and Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU). Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), by contrast, operates it’s own app store in China and it continues to see revenue growth as more iPhones and iPads are sold there.

Google Play could soon capture China’s market

A new report from The Informaiton claims Google wants to launch the Google Play store in China soon. Android already has a large presence in the country with about 95 percent of the company’s smartphones sold there during last year’s 4th quarter.

Beijing Tech Hive organizer Andy Mok explained, “In the app space there are more and more interesting products developed in China, and Google would certainly want a share of that.It’s a huge positive for Chinese developers because more distribution is always a good thing.”

Xiaomi and Huawei continue to rise

According to chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, China is on the list of 60 countries on Google’s app store developer list. Google has become more reliant on app revenues, during the third quarter, the search engine’s other category (which includes Google Play) rose by 50%. The marketplace was the main driver for the expansion. While Google continues to search for a way to improve apps in China, there continues to be a parallel rise in smartphone brands like Huawei Technologies Co. and Xiaomi Corporation. The latter company’s founder believes his company could become the world’s largest smartphone maker in five years.

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