All About Aliyun OS, China’s New Mobile Platform [Interview]

About two weeks ago, a man walked onto a stage and unveiled a game-changing mobile OS. But since he was wearing a peach-colour shirt and not a black turtleneck sweater, we’re not talking about Steve Jobs.

The man in question was Wang Jian, and he gave the world its first peek at the Aliyun phone and mobile OS. As the president of AliCloud – a division of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba – he explained that the cloud-based smartphone and tablet software was Alibaba’s bid to make China’s first open and convenient mobile OS.

Alibaba’s significant foray into mobile, software, and cloud-computing opened up a lot of questions, so Penn Olson reached out to the company and got some answers from an Alibaba Group spokesperson.

A mobile platform is only as good as its developers – a problem that Android, HP, and BlackBerry are grappling with right now – so this is perhaps the first hurdle that Aliyun faces when it hits the shelves soon on a K-Touch manufactured W700 phone (pictured above and bottom). Chinese app devs will need it to be more affordable than developing for rival platforms, and start-ups will be judging what kind of leverage they can get on the Aliyun OS, compared to launching on Android, iOS or Symbian. The Alibaba spokesperson explains:

The Aliyun OS, coupled with the cloud services provided by AliCloud, greatly reduces the cost and time barriers for developers as they can either develop cloud apps with their own fully developed servers or opt for AliCloud’s cloud infrastructure service at a nominal fee; developers can therefore devote more attention to business innovation. Third-party mobile software developers will be able to use technology such as HTML5 and JavaScript to reduce the complexity in the app development process.

We hope to help third party developers to enter this platform and will hold a developer’s conference later this year for developers to attend and learn how to use the cloud platform and how to develop cloud apps. Aliyun OS may also be integrated with other mobile devices, including mobile phones with larger screens and tablet computers in the coming months.

Aliyun is a custom-made OS that Alibaba has been secretly working on for years, whilst simultaneously publicly building up its AliCloud business. Although it’s not Android-based, it will be fully compatible with Android apps, which might help with initial traction if it means users can still play popular games such as Angry Birds on it.

On the app store front, Alibaba explains to us:

We will provide users with two channels or storefronts to access apps: the first being our cloud app store containing third-party and sister company cloud apps, and the other being the “native app” store that offers Android apps, which can be downloaded and installed onto the mobile device.