China's Tencent Launches Smart Hardware OS To Rival Alibaba

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @03:13AM from the diversity-in-approach dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Chinese internet and media giant Tencent Holdings has today launched an operating system for mobile devices such as internet-connected phones, TVs, smartwatches and other IoT products. Tencent Operating System (OS) TOS+ is open to all developers and manufacturers free of charge should they agree to share their revenue – a framework similar to Google's popular Android mobile OS. The new Tencent OS offering, which provides voice recognition and mobile payment systems, will rival other home-grown operating systems looking to conquer the smart hardware arena with connected wearables, TVs and smart homeware technology. These competitors include smartphone maker Xiaomi and Asia's largest internet company Alibaba, who hopes to see its recently launched Yun OS eventually installed on tens of millions of smartphones. The Chinese systems for mobile and hardware products provide an alternative to Google's services, which constantly face challenges across the country due to strict censorship and licensing laws.

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No Thank You by Warhaven · 2015-04-28 03:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

I mean, if I can avoid it, as "share revenue" really means, "sharing with China your company's trade secrets, code, prototype designs, and inside information via the backdoor passwords, sniffers, loggers, and whatever else is bundled with their new OS".