Amazon & Google, has Amazon won?

The app stores in the world's largest mobile phone market were always going to be a close run thing, but is it over?

Google's Chinese store for its mobile operating system - the most popular globally - only offers free apps, so there was always room for paying apps, the only thing was, who would get there first? 

As it turns out, the winner of that race now appears to be Amazon, presumably paving the way for it to launch it's new Kindle e-reader. 

Other locally-based services already offer paid apps to China, but many of the home-grown services face issues with malicious software contained within apps, some of which are pirated versions.

In contrast, the Amazon store, which launched over the weekend, promises "quality and safety testing".

As well as curating existing apps, Amazon said it will work with local developers to create programs specifically for local users.

The move is part of Amazon's strategy to dig deeper into the Chinese mobile phone market.

Compared to its dominant position in other countries such as the US and UK, Amazon controlled less than 3% of China's massive 169bn yuan (£17.6bn) business-to-consumer e-commerce market in the fourth quarter last year.

In December last year, the retailer launched its Kindle web store, but is yet to sell the actual e-reader devices. 

To be honest with all of you, I don't really know why this is big news. Google is bound to catch up, it always does, and Amazon is probably going to have problems anyway! What do you think?