Talks with China Mobile fail over who can sell apps
Talks with Apple to sell the iPhone in the Chinese market have stalled again, according to Interfax -- this time over the fact that China Mobile wanted to sell iPhone apps directly to customers, rather than through the App Store.
A source in the Interfax story said that China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou said that buying extras for mobile phones is different for Chinese customers, since many are accustomed to using prepaid credits rather than a credit card. Wang said that China Mobile would have to play some part in providing apps to customers, if only to fulfill this payment scheme.
China Mobile's "application shop," announced in November, would have sold apps for not only iPhones, but for Symbian- and Linux-based phones, too. Apple obviously wanted to sell iPhone apps through iTunes, as it does now all over the world.
Wang declared to Apple that "China Mobile should operate the application store itself in order to maintain its advantage."
It's unclear what this means for the future of the iPhone in China. China has other carriers, like China Unicom, and the lengths that Apple has gone to to please China Mobile might be reason enough to look for another partner. Rumors last year suggested China Mobile demanded an iPhone with a reduced feature set that some analysts later predicted could be the iPhone nano.
[Via MacDailyNews.]
