China not pleased with Google’s control of its smartphone industry

Google-China-Office-w630 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

China is not pleased with the practices of tech conglomerate Google, according to a report written by Reuters earlier today. In a paper written by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, researchers there claim that Google has an overwhelming amount of control over the Chinese smartphone industry, and that it’s taken extra measures to suppress domestic manufacturers from gaining traction. The research firm believes that China has the wherewithal to create its own widespread mobile operating system, and thinks that’s the road it should go down due to restrictions Google has in place on its otherwise open source OS.

“While the Android system is open source,” reads the paper, “the core technology and technology roadmap is strictly controlled by Google.” It states that, despite the open source nature of Android, Google goes out of its way to delay the release of the code to outside parties.

Though the paper didn’t offer any suggestions on how to regulate Google in the country, it did go on to praise domestic mobile manufacturers Alibaba Group, Baidu Inc., and Huawei Technologies.

Duncan Clark, chairman of, BDA, a China-based advisory firm, pointed out that regulations in China have a track record of being put into place most frequently when said regulations could help to benefit the growth of domestic companies.

As we recently reported, China finally surpassed the United States as the biggest smartphone market, so it’s not surprising that the country would want to make every effort to turn those record sales numbers toward its own home-grown companies. Right now, Android comprises about 90 percent of all mobile operating systems in the country.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the situation and report back as more information is made available.

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