The Chinese market has 500 million smartphone users and is still growing

Absrtact: Masanari Arai, founder and CEO of K Company, has analyzed the development potential, main roles and pain points of China's mobile application ecosystem, and the main contents are as follows. When media circles talk about China's smartphone application ecosystem

Masanari Arai, founder and CEO of K, recently wrote an analysis of the development potential, main roles and pain points of China's mobile application ecosystem, the main contents of which are as follows.

When the media talk about China's smartphone application ecosystem, the focus is on successful gaming applications and localized applications such as "micro-mail". But what you won't hear is whether there is a glimmer of growth potential in the Chinese market for non game apps, especially those developed by foreign developers. In addition, for developers interested in developing the Chinese market, it is also very difficult for them to understand the pain points in China's application market, because there are so few relevant information.

These are also the problems that we often encounter in our work, and we often encounter them when working with mobile applications partners who are thinking of moving into the China Mobile (microblogging) market. In fact, the rapid development of China's mobile market has attracted many foreign application developers to enter the market. However, for those foreign companies who want to enter China Mobile's application market, they should understand the following basic points:

The Chinese market has 500 million smartphone users and is still growing

The industry expects China to have 500 million smartphone users by the end of the year, a boom that is well known in Silicon Valley, but it needs to be noted that most of the users are still using fairly low-end Android handsets. In the past 1.5, the number of functional mobile phone users in China has fallen sharply, with about 90% of the functional mobile users upgrading to entry-level Android smartphones. Since most smartphone functions in China still lag far behind those in Europe and the US, developers should consider developing mobile apps that are best suited to smartphones in the Chinese market.

App Store countless but important roles only 20

The Chinese market has hundreds of Android app stores, most of which are targeted specifically at their own applications or users, while other app stores may be primarily used to spread unlock or pirate apps. However, only about 20 of these app stores are the main players in China's entire mobile application ecosystem. Of course, it is not surprising that major handset makers in the Chinese market have their own app stores and integrate their own applications into their own devices. China's three major telecoms companies also have their own app stores.

The number of application stores means many approvals and billing procedures

For foreign application developers, it is important to focus on the top 20 app stores in China in order to distribute applications in the Chinese market. This will also mean that you will have good resources to help you deal with all the approvals and certification issues, as well as a large number of revenue distribution issues. Each application store has its own guidelines and procedures, as well as various government tax and banking transactions. As a result, many Western application developers prefer to collaborate with third-party companies that exist in the Chinese market and focus their application offerings on the latest app stores in China. In fact, we believe that when foreign application developers want to tap into China's big potential market, they should work with China's "top five" app stores.

However, it should be noted that what I call "the top five" is likely to change. China's rapid development of the market, the rapid change, yesterday or market leader, overnight may be far behind. To do this, I recommend that developers not only track the application performance of those app stores, but also focus on the current status of the App store where they are published.

More flowering.

Although the game is still the most profitable application in the Chinese market so far, we still see many other applications starting to work, such as educational applications and infrastructure applications, especially those that share audio, video and images, which are currently downloaded in large quantities. As mentioned above, Cross-platform information application "micro-letter" is very popular, well received by the users.

Important roles dominate China's application market

In addition to the micro-letter, China's other internet giants are also exerting their efforts to apply the market, and to this end to issue or purchase new services to support this work. To this end, we also remind those application developers who apply products that may be directly competitive with China's key players to avoid such competition, whether or not you have enough resources, influence and willpower to compete with them. At the same time, these internet giants are trying to dominate many of the popular applications that have been established, and thus ignore many potential applications. (We believe there is still a large number of potential applications that, despite the current low popularity, may appeal to China's rising middle class user base.) Therefore, I strongly suggest that foreign application developers who want to enter the China Mobile market should work with social networking companies with deeper qualifications in the Chinese market or with top social networking companies, which will increase growth opportunities.

Pain points other than piracy

In the Chinese market, there are still some problems in intellectual property affairs. In addition, in the Chinese market, foreign application developers also need cloud services backend support, which may also be a challenge for them.

Ignore these pain points and focus on growth potential

However, despite these pain points, we should also see the positive side: the application business will reap huge revenue in the Chinese market. More and more consumers in the Chinese market are starting to use high-quality paid apps, and some developers will start to generate revenue in a few days after they have been released in the Chinese market, which is why we should ignore the pain point and release the application as soon as possible. These pain points do exist, but we should also see the enormous development potential of China Mobile's application market.