This week, China Mobile officially scheduled its mobile app store (Mobile Market) with over 4,000 applications now available. Mobile apps and services are available at no cost to users until the end of September. This is a smart move from China Mobile as it likely to help drive the adoption of its mobile app store. China Mobile hopes it can leverage its extensive relationships with mobile app providers. Ten smartphone models currently support China Mobile’s mobile app store. Those include handsets from LG, Samsung, Nokia, Samsung, Dopod and Dell. Can China Mobile beat Apple at their own game and get to 65,000+ apps? Why not? But not anytime soon.
In the meantime, China Unicom signed a contract with Apple in which the Chinese carrier agreed to buy 5 million iPhones. We are talking about RMB 10 billion or $1.46 billion. That’s quite impressive. In the coming months, the battle between China Mobile and China Unicom in the mobile app store space is going to be intense. China Unicom/Apple are likely to have the upper hand. The iPhone and its popular mobile app store will be a driving force here, but as China Mobile starts to add more apps, and add new advanced 3G smartphones (e.g. OPhone from Dell), things could get very interesting.
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Julien Blin is the CEO & Principal Analyst at JBB Research (www.jbbresearch.com), a research and consulting company focusing on the wireless space. He is an experienced former IDC Wireless Analyst. He is frequently quoted by leading and newswires like The New York Times, WSJ.com, Business Week, etc. He specializes in 3G/4G mobile apps/services, network technologies (e.g. LTE, WiMAX), the U.S, Europe, and emerging markets (e.g. Africa, Middle East, South America, and China).
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