China Unicom To Still Offer Android

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Although China and Google have had some high-profile disagreements lately, this hasn’t stopped China Unicom – China’s biggest telcom and the second biggest in the world, from still wanting to use the Android operating system on their new mobile phones, while their rival goes on with their own OPhone OS.

China Mobile is China Unicom’s biggest competitor in the Chinese telcom market. China Mobile uses OPhone, a mobile OS that was originally designed by Android, Inc. before it was bought by Google and became, you know, that Android. You could say that China Unicom’s interest in Android is so they can compete with OPhone and China Mobile.

Although China is a huge market, Google may not want anything to do with them. They delayed the launch of two smartphones that were set to launch on China Unicom that were running Android, and they’ve also canceled developer events that took place in China

When Google delayed the launch of those Samsung and Motorola Android phones in China, speculation had it that if Google closed their Chinese operations (like they threatened) that would somehow interfere with the running of the Google Experience apps that run on Android. This hasn’t been confirmed, however.

China Unicom’s chairman, Chang Xiaobing said at a conference in Beijing, “We are open to mobile phone operating systems, and we recognize that Android is a mainstream system… We will definitely use Google’s Android in our mobile handsets.“