The US-China trade war is entering a new round: the four largest Chinese vendors — Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo and Vivo — are working on their own store for the Android platform.
According to Reuters, the platform will be created as part of the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA). Despite the lack of an official announcement, the alliance already has a website. It says:
GDSA is designed to create a universal set of services, including content distribution, developer support, marketing, brand promotion and monetization for all developers in the world. These services will help developers to tell about themselves and get quality users.
It is also noted that at the start of the service will cover nine countries, including India, Indonesia, Russia and Malaysia. Initially, the platform was supposed to launch in March, but now, according to Reuters sources, its release may be postponed due to the situation with the coronavirus.
The work on the platform is essentially a new step in the confrontation between the United States and China.
- At the beginning of last year, the United States Department of Commerce added Huawei to the “black list” of companies.
- Google was the first to react to this: in the spring, it announced that all future Huawei devices would not have access to its services (including Google Play, Google Maps, Gmail, and so on).
- In response, Huawei released its own Android—based operating system, Harmony OS, in August, and in December announced that it was preparing an original mobile ecosystem that duplicates Google’s similar one.
The formation of GDSA is seen as an initiative, participation in which will insure against possible future blocking of Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo. It’s just unclear whether it is based on Huawei solutions or is a separate development.
According to IDC, collectively, these companies accounted for 40.1% of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of last year.