Wang Jian, president of Alibaba Cloud Computing, launches the Aliyun OS at an event in Beijing today.
This afternoon, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has confirmed the existence of its own mobile operating system, the “Aliyun OS.” It will launch at the end of this month on a K-Touch W700 phone.
Alibaba also reveals that the Aliyun OS will make its way onto other phones – and even tablets – later this year. It looks like a challenger to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, which are both increasingly popular in China.
We’ve reported on leaks of this over the past few weeks – first seeing some screenshots, and then getting a peek at the handset too.
In the press release Alibaba emphasizes how this has essentially been three years in the making, after first establishing its AliCloud division. The Aliyun OS will utilize those cloud-computing services for many core functions, such as email, maps, GPS, back-ups, contacts, SMS storage, photos, and notes.
Wang Jian (pictured top), president of Alibaba Cloud Computing, launched the mobile OS at a press conference in Beijing this afternoon. He said:
Mobile users want a more open and convenient mobile OS, one that allows them to truly enjoy all that the Internet has to offer right in the palm of their hand, and the cloud OS, with its use of cloud-based applications, will provide that.
How will Aliyun work for app developers? Alibaba explains:
Third-party developers can opt to either develop cloud apps over their own servers or choose to use AliCloud’s infrastructure and open platform services at a low cost and quickly develop their businesses.
Alibaba is also stressing how its mobile OS will support mobile-optimized web apps, in contrast to Apple’s emphasis on downloading apps via iTunes.
Here’s the full press release:
This is very interesting….. looking forward for what will happen in the next few months
After the Microsoft, Oracle beating up of Android in the courts, this has become necessary.
A very tech-y friend of mine tried to explain cloud computing to me and both of us were tearing our hair out by the time he gave up. Even an article on the “For Dummies” website failed miserably when it came to making me understand how it worked.
But even to my layman’s brain, being able to use applications without having to download them is clearly a step forwards. And in my opinion, this operating system overall is a good move for Alibaba. I doubt they’ve gone to the trouble of designing it just to make access to wholesale suppliers easy via smartphone but that’s got to be one reason. And while not everyone has a smartphone, I can’t imagine there are many business people without one and I’m guessing it’s those people that Alibaba really want to target.