Android Market in China is up and running again

Google and China has had a rather rocky relationship to date, and this time around the most recent incident between the two ‘giants’ would be Google’s Android Market being inaccessible to users in mainland China. While some felt that this was the result of an intentional government block, Google managed to stave any potentially explosive situation by claiming it is but a glitch related to a software update.

According to Google spokesman Taj Meadows via an e-mail, “We identified a technical issue during a software update and have now fixed it.” When one performed a search for “market.android.com” at Greatfirewallofchina.org and blockedinchina, it showed that the Android Market was blocked across the major regions of China, among them comprising Beijing, Shenzen, Inner Mongolia, the Heilongjiang Province, and the Yunnan Province.

No idea on why the Android Market was blocked though, so you can expect a fair amount of speculation to emerge from this. Some say this might have been an attempt to protect a new mobile operating system known as Qiushi that is part of by Chinese search engine giant Baidu’s plan – which would be a major competitor to Android. All’s well now though – what do you think happened?