Chinese Company Developing Cloud-Based Mobile OS to Rival iOS, Android in China

[Michael Essany]

Apple may be gunning for dominance within the enormous and highly lucrative mobile phone population in China, but if Alibaba Group has its druthers, Apple and Google may see their respective mobile operating systems face some stiff competition from the supposedly in-development cloud-based mobile OS designed by the Chinese e-commerce giant.

If reports coming out of China and reported by the Wall Street Journal this morning are accurate, Alibaba Group's very own smartphone operating system could debut before the end of 2011. Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that the aforementioned mobile OS will make it possible for consumers to skirt the app download process. Instead, users can access their applications via remote storage.

Details weren't available on the pricing of the operating system and its apps, or on which handset makers will use the software. But the person said smartphone usage in China could broaden if Alibaba achieves its goals with the project.

If successfully developed and launched, Alibaba's creation could do some serious damage to the emerging mobile phone market shares presently held in Asia by Google's Android operating system, Apple's iPhone, and even Microsoft's Windows Phone.

Although Alibaba Group is best known for operating online-commerce websites, it's important to keep in mind that Apple wasn't exactly known for it's mobile phones before 2007.

Naturally, at this time, little is known about the mobile OS being developed by Alibaba. Still, there is no reason to believe that the offering will ultimately be contained to China or even Asia. The first version will heavily target the Chinese market, but there is "nothing that prevents it from being used elsewhere eventually," sources tell the WSJ.

Source: WSJ

[drumcode]

finding it hard to take a company called Alibaba, serious

[ibfr33k]

It definitely won't work in my area. We still don't even have 3G here yet. I would be happy having Edge. With my 2kb/sec speed the phone would suck if all apps and stuff was cloud based.

[jOnGarrett]

If I were Apple or Google, Id be more worried about the Chinese and their violations of intellectual property rights.

I can already see some horrible monster coming from the far east., a monster that's an exact clone of the world's most popular phone (iphone 4) running the world's most popular OS (Android)

and ruin both.

[politicalslug]

Alibaba doesn't sound Chinese to me.

[Orby]

Alibaba doesn't sound Chinese to me.

It seems like an unusual choice of name, but alibaba.com (and its owners, the Alibaba Group) is a serious (and seriously Chinese) force to be reckoned with. Alibaba owns a large cloud-computing firm and a chunk of one of the major Chinese web portals (Yahoo! China). They know a thing or two about computing and sales.

Heck, even if the Baba OS (hypothetical name) only caters to the Chinese market, it's aimed squarely at a roughly 900,000,000-person strong market (roughly seventeen percent of the global cell phone market) that's been a somewhat hard-to-crack nut for many Western and Japanese companies. Baba OS doesn't need to focus anywhere other than China (and possibly India) to get a serious chunk of market share.

[SkyMuffin]

It won't matter unless they can get some decent developers in on it, too. Otherwise, their appstore will be just as behind as the Android appstore is right now.