For Motorola and HTC, Android Success in China Requires Adaptations

When it comes to smartphone sales in China, Motorola and HTC have garnered the most consistent success from their Android platform – although it has required some careful tweaking, adaptation and replacement of apps to make Android sell in China.

This week Motorola announced one million smartphones sold in mainland China in Q1 2011 (of course, not all are Android), whilst, at the same time, HTC said they’d triple the number of shops here, to as many as 2000 outlets by the end of this year.

But for both HTC and Motorola, it’s proving to be an ongoing battle to make Google’s Android mobile OS work – and sell – in China, as a result of Google’s troubles in China. Motorola’s CEO, Sanjay Jha, explained to the Wall Street Journal on his current trip to Beijing:

Some of the services that are available on most Android phones are not available here, so we have built relationships with Baidu and Microsoft to enable all of those applications to be available on our devices.

What that means is adding a tablet-spec Tudou app to the Motorola Xoom, for example; or HTC’s tie-up with a Chinese email provider.

Google, however, is not exactly innocent in these issues that make Android a hassle in China: Android comes with no Android IME installed, meaning that a third-party app is needed to type Chinese. HTC and Motorola opted to avoid that out-of-the-box omission, with a good Chinese IME in their adapted Chinese smartphones.

Also, the Android Market in China is one of the few in the world without paid apps support. Which is where the Moto SHOP4APPS and HTC app stores bring their own tailored selection of free and paid apps.

MT870 vs Sensation

Both Motorola and HTC have new, dual-core, qHD smartphones aimed at business users in China: Motorola’s MT870 (pictured, top) is an Atrix-like beast on TD-SCDMA 3G exclusively for China Mobile. HTC, meanwhile, has the upcoming HTC Sensation (pictured, right) that’ll roll out with China Mobile and China Unicom (as a WCDMA variant).

[Sources: Taiwan Economic News for HTC stats; WSJ Online for Motorola’s]