Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is claiming that Google has used undue pressure to kill the release of the Acer CloudMobile A800, a smartphone that would have been powered by Alibaba’s own cloud based mobile OS.
Alibaba executives posted a message on the company’s own news site which reads:
“A spokesman for Alibaba Cloud Computing, developer of the Aliyun 2.0 cloud OS, called Google’s action “clearly unfair to consumers and we are concerned about the impact on customer access to competitive products.”
The phone was set to be released today, instead journalists showing up for the press conference were told it had been cancelled.
Following the cancellation of the Acer A800 event Alibaba released the following statement:
“Our partner received notification that if the new product launch with Aliyun went ahead, Google would terminate Android product cooperation and related technical authorization with Acer.”
Google and Acer have remained tight-lipped about any potential threats made against the use of the Google Android OS.
The claim by the Alibaba group seems strange considering the number of device manufacturers who create mobile products for various mobile platforms. For example Samsung creates Windows Phone and Google Android based handsets.
Even more strange is the fact that the Alibaba Aliyun mobile platform is meant for lower-end devices which would not impact Google’s smartphone reach in any drastic fashion.
Finally, Acer could simply take Google Android’s open source hardware and create an off-shoot of the platform, much like Amazon has done with the Tablet Fire HD series. Albeit if Acer went that route it would lose access to Google Play and other Google supported features. Without the e-commerce pull Amazon has achieves an off-shoot of Android could be a hard sell.