Despite Google's Withdraw, Chinese Cell Providers To Still Offer Android

Tweet

China is a pretty big market and Google made news this week when they withdrew from that country following disputes over censorship and security issues. Despite the providing company leaving China, the three major Chinese telcom providers still plan to offer Android-powered mobile phones in the country, just sans Google.

Sources within the Taiwan mobile phone industry (cough, HTC, cough) have told the folks at DigiTimes that the Chinese providers have decided to press on with their orders for various Android devices. China’s “Big Three” cell service providers, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom all either currently carry or have various Android devices in development from phone manufacturers.

For them, Android is too appealing of a platform and they say that they’ll go on with another search engine in Google’s place. We’ve already seen Motorola put Bing in place of Google on all their Android devices. While DigiTimes says that it’s easy for the carriers to substitute in another search engine in place of Google, it seems to us that the Android experience would be heavily affected if the Google apps were simply removed (see the crippled Motorola Backflip from AT&T).

Just after Google went public with their disagreement with China, the tech giant managed to block the release of two Android devices from Motorola and Samsung in China. Google cited “current uncertainty” at the time as to why the phones were being release. Of course, Android phones have been released in China since. Since a vast majority of Google’s income comes from search engine revenues, ostensibly their whole business model behind Android is to make revenue off of the Google search engine – ergo, it makes sense that Google wouldn’t be too pleased with an Android device that didn’t have Google search.