Only China?
Check miuiandroid, miui.us, miui.it, and so on, and you'll see that MIUI is enjoying a widespread acceptance in the west also.
The trend among domestic Chinese mobile players to build their own, highly localised, operating systems based on Android, is set to drive additional revenue and push smartphone adoption to a tipping point in 2013, but many efforts are likely to be short-lived, according to IDC. The trend for hyper-local Androids can be …
Check miuiandroid, miui.us, miui.it, and so on, and you'll see that MIUI is enjoying a widespread acceptance in the west also.
As far as I can understand, Google doesn't get paid for the use of Android. The assumption is that they then get their money through the use of the Google services that Android provides.
But does this hold true in China? Is Google benefiting from the use of Android in such a market, or has it just shot itself in the foot?
The fact that Android is open source means that anyone can pick it up and do what they want with it. In fact, Chinese OEMs/carriers have been supplying smartphones with no Google software on them for sometime now.
Google wasn't joking when they said in the Oracle trail that they aren't making money on Android. They make their money from their applications and marketplace, not the OS itself.
Google doesn't benefit at all you cannot even use most of their stuff properly in China.
Baidu are going to / have made a version with their stuff replacing the gapps.
Cyanogenmod got their radio app contributed from MIUI (MIUI is at its heart a Cyanogenmod KANG).
China could develop something from scratch if it wanted to. (It is probably in a better position than anyone else to do so).
It is different to the West - the government owns all the mobile networks and has involvement with allot of the tech companies also.
It has lots of people / low wages / quite allot of talent (Some of the stuff they manage from nothing is very impressive) and the government can decide that it wants something like this done and make it happen.
I am almost certain within my lifetime they will be the world's biggest superpower. (I am 30 now).