For Tourists, Buying an Android Device in China is Best Avoided

Wait... This phone doesn't have the Android Market... The homepage looks totally different... This isn't what I wanted... GaaaaaahhhHHHHHH!

There are a lot of nice things a foreign tourist could buy on a trip to mainland China – handicrafts, silk, porcelain – but an Android phone or tablet should be at the bottom of your list. In fact, they should be avoided altogether. Why? Because the vast majority of Android devices sold in the country have been heavily modified by either the mobile telco or a shady third-party grey-importer – rendering your gadget perhaps devoid of the Android Market, and/or a security risk that could be sending sensitive data to a mysterious host. Yes, that HTC Incredible S, Motorola Atrix 2, or Sony Xperia glinting in that gadget mall in Shanghai is most probably home to totally different software than you were hoping for. And so I’d like to spell out three reasons why you shouldn’t buy any such device in the country…

But first I should explain that the reason for all this is the simple matter of localization, and it’s all quite innocuous. The vast majority of Chinese Android users do not like to use the Android Market, and many don’t have/want Google accounts, and so it has evolved that a lot of core features get ripped out. This applies to both official releases from China’s mobile networks as well as all those grey-imported phones that have been schlepped over the border from Hong Kong or elsewhere. Both those sources effectively create a ‘branded’ version of the mobile OS that differs greatly from what you might expect – so while the hardware is fine, your purchase from China will be a pain to use once you get it back home.

But while some missing apps – such as an absent YouTube or Gmail – might be easy to install at a later date – it’s damn near impossible to install the Android Market on a branded phone that has been tweaked and modded to exclude it. That’s almost certainly what you’ll buy in some gadget mall in China. I’ve been told by a grey-importer that it’s “impossible” to buy an un-modded HTC phone or tablet in China – meaning that some shady source has branded the phone with a version of Android that is very hard to remove, and which will almost certainly come pre-installed with a Chinese third-party app store such as GoAPK (pictured above) or HiAPK. Almost certainly, money is involved in all this, and some third-party app stores are paying the modders commission to pre-install and ‘brand’ the phone before it gets onto shelves.

The Tencent App Store for Android is another such alternative Chinese-made Android app store. But is it what you wanted?

Even if you buy from the safer source – the mobile telco – it’ll come with a different store, such as China Unicom’s Wo Store, or Motorola’s Shop4Apps. And those are fine, but again it’s an issue of them not being useful once the tourist gets back to his/her country.

In summary, the three core reasons are (though, indeed, it boils down to one: branded Android phones suck)…

3 Reasons to Avoid…

1. Modded and branded phones rob you of the Market app, leaving you struggling to find and install apps.

2. Such modded phones are a security risk, in that you’ve no idea – we’re talking about the grey-import devices now – what might have been added to the branded ROM that they’ve put on your device. Plus, the alternative Android app stores do not check for malware, and are thought to be a leading channel of malicious apps.

3. Branded phones are really difficult to restore to a proper state. So if you want the ‘normal’ HTC Sense experience, or the conventional Motorola overlay that you were hoping for, you need to go through a pretty tortuous and technically challenging hacking sequence (as explained briefly below).

Some Solutions…

But, judging by the number of emails I get from people who’ve bought Android devices in China – and which always take the form of pleas for help – people are still getting duped by all that modded software and then find themselves in a quandary. With the disclaimer that I’ve never before hacked an Android phone in order to restore it – and therefore you risk ‘bricking’ it and rendering it totally unusable – the solution seems to be two-fold:

1. Generate a ‘gold card’ - Make a so-called gold card on a spare SD card. This is needed to dupe your phone into accepting a ROM (see step two) that’s different from your current branded one. This useful wiki from Aseith.com details the massively difficult process very clearly.

2. Pick a ROM - With step one completed, you can then find the correct ROM online – or some different one that you fancy, such as Cyanogenmod’s – and then ‘flash’ that onto your phone in order to get yourself an un-branded, un-tweaked, un-molested, factory fresh handset. Like you thought it was in the first place.

By the way, don’t be fooled by the two-step process above. It could take an inexperienced person half a day to figure it all out and get it done – with, remember, the risk of it all going wrong.

One whole other path is for you to just live with your Chinese branded phone as is, and use some other app store – such as Getjar.com – and source apps from there instead. If you’re in the US, Amazon’s Android Appstore is another option.

So, the tl;dr for this article is do not buy an Android device in mainland China unless you like pain and suffering – or unless you’re certain that it’s unmodded and unbranded. I bought my own untweaked Nexus S here, and it’s absolutely fine.