OMS and Tapas = Android?

Something I glossed over in yesterday’s Android market share news from Canalys was this footnote:

The Google numbers in this table relate to Android, as well as the OMS and Tapas platform variants.

DF reader AP pointed this out via email:

That really makes me wonder. OMS (Ophone) and Tapas are both Chinese-only. I assume (rightly? wrongly?) that, since they’ve been modified for a native market, they lack a lot (all?) of Google’s normal “hooks” in the OS.

Are things like maps, email, search, and advertising served through Google? Or do they come from Chinese companies? Put another way, are OMS and Tapas variants of Android, or separate platforms forked from Android? As far as I understand, neither OMS nor Tapas have any access to Android Market, so they certainly aren’t helping to build a software platform.

Either way, it would be interesting to know how many of those 33 million Android devices are OMS and Tapas.

Tuesday, 1 February 2011