Acer Cancels Chinese Smartphone Launch Following Pressure from Google

Taiwan’s Acer has called off a press conference to launch a new smartphone based on an operating system developed by China’s Alibaba Group, allegedly following pressure from Google.

The Chinese firm made a statement regarding the issue saying “Our partner was notified by Google that if the product runs Aliyun OS, Google will terminate its Android-related cooperation and other technology licensing with our partner.”

Alibaba is a giant Chinese conglomerate which is also operates Yahoo’s Chinese portal. The company had been working on its own smartphone OS, called Aliyun, which is already available in phones from Haier and K-Touch. The Aliyun based smartphones are currently available in China only.

The move made by Google seems unusual considering the fact that even existing Android loyalists such as HTC and Samsung offer handset with other operating systems in them.

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.”

Neither Acer nor Google are commenting on the allegations