China Telecom: 60 Million Users In Our App Store, More WP7 Stuff Coming

The China Telecom E-Surfing app store on my phone today. Note the two Angry Birds clone games that are featured!

All three of China’s mobile telcos have their own app stores, offering up – and sometimes selling – a mix of mostly Android smartphone and JAVA feature-phone apps. And now the smallest of the three, China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728), has revealed some user stats for its Tianyi – or “E-Surfing,” to give it its English moniker – app store and said that it’ll cooperate more deeply with Microsoft on the Windows Phone (WP) mobile OS.

The E-Surfing stats were revealed by China Telecom’s app market head, Dong Tao. He said the the store – at 189store.com – now has 60 million users, 20 million monthly downloads, and a grand total of 100,000 apps covering Android, Samsung Brew, and the older Windows Mobile 6 platforms. But those figures pale in comparison to some of the startup third-party Android app stores in the country. Just last month, one such site, 91 Mobile, said that it saw 900 million downloads (including updates) in the first quarter of this year.

As for buddying-up even more with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), it’s not clear if that will entail WP7 apps replacing the obsolete WinMo 6 ones in the E-Surfing store, or whether it pertains just to more marketing and support for its sales of the CDMA version of Nokia’s Lumia 800. But WP7 is not so open as the old WinMo 6 in terms of side-loading apps, and so – unless jail-broken – WP users need to use the official Marketplace. And so it’s more likely that China Telecom’s store will aggregate and link to a bunch of apps in the Marketplace in future. In addition, Dong Tao said that his company would engage more with WP app developers and offer up its services to them, such as using the telco’s testing facilities or its cloud platform.

We’ll have to wait and see how that benefits Microsoft’s new mobile OS in China, but it certainly needs more friends in its battle against the dominant Android and the strong iOS.

[Source: Chinabyte – article in Chinese]