Google reportedly has plans to launch the Play Store in China early next year
After Google pulled its services out of the country nearly 5 years ago, it looks as though Google and China are finally ready to mend their troubled history and bury the hatchet. Reuters is reporting that Google will launch the Google Play Store in China sometime early next year.
Now, this wont be the same Play Store we have out here — no, sir. China will be getting its own specialty app store that doesn’t connect with the rest of the world. This has to do with the Communist Party’s strict content filtering and laws that require the company to keep all data within the country.
Still, with more than 1.3 billion people living in China, this could be a huge opportunity for Google providing everything goes according to plan. The move could come only a few months after Google launched the first Chinese-made Nexus device — the Nexus 6P — built by Huawei, one of China’s (and the world’s) biggest smartphone manufacturers.