Image Source: Visual China

BEIJING, May 18 (TMTPOST) — Chinese tech giant Tencent has taken legal actions against smartphone maker Vivo, accusing the latter of unfair competition.

The trial will start on May 20, according to information published by Jinan Intermediate People's Court.

Tencent MyApp (Yingyongbao) accuses Vivo of preventing users from downloading and installing MyApp and other mobile applications through MyApp and instead guiding users to download and install mobile applications via Vivo’s app store. Tencent MyApp said that Vivo was able to do so by making use of the operating system and through methods such as pop-ups, text notice and risk detection. Tencent MyApp believes that Vivo did so to bring in more traffic and achieve business interest.

The court has previously ordered Vivo to immediately stop using methods like pop-ups, text notice and risk detection to prevent MyApp’s normal operation and draw traffic to Vivo’s own app store.

In China, the competition among mobile application marketplaces is fierce. Most smartphone makers such as Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo have their own application stores while Internet giants such as Baidu and Tencent have their own as well. As of late 2020, there were 3.45 million applications that had been detected by the authorities.

Launched in 2012, MyApp is an Android mobile application marketplace from Tencent. Statistics from mobile market research firm Singular show Tencent’s MyApp had around 217 million monthly active users in April 2021, which made MyApp the second biggest application marketplace in the Chinese market, following Huawei’s App Market which had 261 million monthly users. Oppo’s app store, which ranked third in terms of monthly active users, had around 186 million monthly active users in April 2021.

This is not the first time for Tencent to have disputes with smartphone makers’ app stores. Last January, Huawei removed Tencent’s Tencent Games from its application marketplace.