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This is quite interesting, as the divergence between east and west seems to become more pronounced over time, not less. The divergence in mobile UI styles have
by exelius 12y ago
This is quite interesting, as the divergence between east and west seems to become more pronounced over time, not less. The divergence in mobile UI styles have given rise to entire classes of apps in China that would find no market in the west. Indeed, I doubt many of these would find a market even in Japan (which has similar text entry problems, though somewhat ameliorated by the existence of the hiragana alphabet).
Should we expect the Chinese search giants (which the author mentions are often easier to use than the host OS) to start releasing their own OSes? It seems that Android and iOS are rather poorly designed to Chinese use cases - though no doubt at least Apple is working to fix that (Google has less reason to because, as the author mentions, it is banned in China).
- objclxt 12y agoThere are already numerous forks of Android in China that replace Google services with local equivalents (handsets from Xiaomi, for example, come with their own fork).
- exelius 12y agoRight; I mean more than just a fork that replaces Google services. The author seems to lament that text entry services provided by the big Chinese search engines are not available throughout the OS. Text entry seems to be a huge problem in general in China, and from a strategy standpoint it seems to be almost inextricably linked to the discovery function. Xiaomi is a device manufacturer; I'm specifically referring to Baidu, 360, Sogou, etc. If their search/translation functions really are that much better, they could drive the interface of the phone and create a better experience. The Chinese market is certainly different than the west, but that's what we've seen happen here.
- lucaspiller 12y ago> entire classes of apps in China that would find no market in the west. Could you go into more detail on these apps?