Lacking of paid apps and additional business models, and facing a tough competition from tens of similar services, as we predicted back in April, most Chinese independent Android app stores will have a hard time sooner or later. GFan is the only one we heard recently raised $5 millions and the others such as NDuoa (early invested by Shanda), eoeMarket etc we don’t even know what they are working on. And we even heard that one popular Android app store has been acquired by a giant at a cheap price (as it’s running out of money). Unfortunately, now the situation is even getting worse, the super giant, Tencent, just released its own Android App Store.
As always, Tencent is very good at the products. Its app store, named Tencent App Center has a nice UI and the user experience is good too. And Tencent is also very smart, unlike other app stores, its App Store comes with friends sharing and commenting feature. In other words, if you log into the app center with your QQ account, you would be able to see what apps have been downloaded by your QQ contacts, and their comments on those apps. You can also rank the app, share it on QQ, email or SMS. The idea is similar to FrienzApp, Chomp, AppGroovs etc but the obviously difference is that Tencent App Center has a hundreds of millions of QQ users already standing by.
So how to make money for both Tencent and developers? It has to be mainly from ads. MobWIN, is Tencent’s mobile ads service.