Sinobytes

Two 'App Stores' for China Unicom's iPhone

Nov 4, 2009 16:05

China Unicom's iPhone launched last weekend (though only 5,000 were sold nationwide over those two days), the first official release for the Apple smartphone. One big reason for the huge delay was a battle for control between Apple and China's two mobile telcos while they were vying to land the iPhone deal, for control over the App Store.

It appears that Apple gained only a hollow victory--its App Store is the official source of third-party apps on China Unicom's iPhone. But China Unicom's online App Store, dubbed the China Unicom "Wo" portal, accessed in the Safari Web browser (at iphone.wo.com.cn), has positioned itself as the de facto source of apps for Chinese consumers.

Apple has a Chinese App Store for any iPhone and iPod touch user, but not a Chinese iTunes Store, perhaps presuming that China is not yet ready to pay as much as 0.99 US cents for music when the prevalent pirated CDs are cheaper. The App Store does not contain all the stuff you may be familiar with from the UK or US stores, and the selection is pretty thin in both English and Chinese material.

China Unicom's "Wo" store/portal looks to have a lot more Chinese-language apps, and--very importantly--a much more convenient and known payment method in China: Prepaid credit. Apple's App Store, in contrast, requires a credit card issued by a Chinese bank, which is still not yet commonplace.

The "Wo" portal is tied to each iPhone user's Unicom account and does not require a credit card to set up. Payments can be made by adding prepaid credit to your account: A familiar system to 99 percent of all China's current mobile users. For those two key reasons, China Unicom's own App Store may well gain the edge over Apple's store by being better localized for Chinese consumers, sort of like how Taobao whipped eBay in China.

Here are a bunch of screenshots of Unicom's online "Wo" portal, courtesy of user Leon Lee, as posted on the mobile section of Chinabyte, and showing the layout and choice of apps on the portal.

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