Google Play enters China, starting with serving Chinese developers

December 10th may be a day worth remembering. On this day, Google Play officially announced that its developer-oriented app store service will be open to Chinese developers.

Google held a closed-door conference in Shanghai, "Google PlatTime Shanghai", which was completely open to developers and without media participation. It is understood that Google gave the developers attending the conference a general introduction to the services it can provide, including application testing tools, optimization suggestions, upload, review, and distribution services, as well as Google Analytics data analysis tools.

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There is no doubt that Google Play is currently the largest application distribution platform in the Android ecosystem in the global market (except for mainland China). Google revealed that the three-day retention rate and seven-day retention rate of games downloaded through the Play Games mobile game section of Google Play are very high. In the one year from June 2013 to June this year, Google Play Store paid a total of up to US$5 billion in application download fees to developers around the world, an increase of 250% over the same period last year.

Two weeks ago, Google also announced on its official blog that Chinese developers can now officially submit paid applications to Google as "Chinese developers."

In the past, because Google Play did not provide sales support services to Chinese developers, Chinese developers could only submit free apps or "change their names" and register as developers from other countries. In fact, there are already many excellent Chinese apps on Google Play: most of the apps of major mainstream Internet companies have landed on Google Play, and there are also excellent apps on the market such as Shadowsocks developed by independent developer "Max Lv".

For the Chinese developer community, good things have happened recently. First, Apple's App Store supports binding UnionPay cards and lists applications at an ultra-low price of 1 yuan. Now Google Play also provides support services for Chinese developers. The way and path to sell applications are becoming more convenient and faster.

It is understood that when paid applications submitted by Chinese developers to Google Play are purchased abroad, foreign users can use a variety of payment methods such as Google Play gift cards, PayPal, and operator charges to pay, and the share of the revenue belonging to the Chinese developers can be redeemed through Google's system, returning to the developers in a more convenient way than in the past.

So far, Google Play has completed the first step of entering China - developers. It is still unknown when Chinese Android phone users will be able to purchase Google Play apps in China.

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