Huawei has recently dropped out of the Global Developer Service Alliance, and Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo are moving ahead to launch their own app store, during the first half of this year, 2020.

Perhaps the GDSA has the strategy right, trying to unite forces against Google Play and creating a download platform to become the standard on Chinese-made devices. However, there is much life beyond Google Play, more than enough to compete independently in the marketplace.

Let’s just look at the numbers. Google made $8.8 billion in its app store during 2019, out of the $120 billion that went into the mobile marketplace sector worldwide. Of course, it earned considerable revenues, but only a tiny portion of the total market. Mobile Marketplaces is a classical example of long tail markets, where despite significance of a few players (Google in particular) there is a huge long tail of niche audiences.

The numbers in the industry are rising every year, as is the number of hours people spend in front of their mobile devices. The mobile marketing market is therefore far from saturated. Quite the contrary. It is an increasingly recurring source of income for operators, technology or communication companies.

The massification of consumption is also diversifying the offering and adapting to the particular needs of each audience and user segment. Probably, from now on, we will discover more specialized and less generalized platforms, which will facilitate consumer access to the contents that are really important to him or her, and will offer users complementary services of value, beyond showcasing applications and content.

At Upify we have been able to prove this with our content platform KidsTube, one of our most profitable service offerings in display. All children’s entertainment, with parental control and mobile access control and limit features, so that children can freely play with the devices without ever accessing the rest of applications on the Smartphone or Tablet.

This is still early days for Kids’ content, not yet the billion-dollar revenue of Google Play (yet), but it is a highly profitable platform that improves usage every year and allows creators of children’s oriented content to increase their revenue significantly.

At the end of the year, we will be able to see if the GDSA app store will be a worthy competitor to Google Play or simply another great beneficiary of this booming market. And we’ll also find out if Huawei has materialized their own aspirations in this area or will continue to focus on developing Harmony OS. What is clear is that, far from the economic war between China and the United States, it makes perfect sense that Asian manufacturers want to benefit from this billion-dollar market as well.

If you want to take a step forward and benefit from this growth, remember that at Upify we have highly solvent solutions to build your own distribution platform, tailored to your specific needs and in full alignment with your targeted content.