Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with lower-end smartphones

Re:Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with ... by kurthr on Monday January 01, 2018 @01:50PM (#16047379)

I don't think this makes much sense, just looking at China (where I have some insight). You can easily run Chrome (default install) on a <$150 = 1000 RMB phone from Lenovo/ZTE/BLU. Below $100 today performance quickly drops to unusable.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/8-best-cheap-phones-under-15...

I'm suspicious that the numbers also include non-smart phones, just because of the 430M size, use of the word "mobile", and discussion of a browser from 2004 that predates the iPhone. Further, to the extent that compression is important, I'm suspicious their proxy-compression is a bigger deal for people looking to save money on data (and governments looking to monitor them).

What Google needs to look out for is UC becoming a default App since Alibaba and Alipay are already huge in China, and they could pay for it. Most people don't care about what browser is pre-installed on their phone, if it just works. Of course an Indonesian or Indian company could do this just as well as Alibaba.

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Re:Alibaba’s UC Browser is dominating in Asian markets with ... by Symbiote on Monday January 01, 2018 @05:27PM (#16048389)

"Mobile" is just British / Commonwealth English for a cell phone, regardless of performance or features. Maybe the author is based in such a country.

I can believe 430M, compared to a few years ago it seems every other person in a developing country now has one.

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