This means that all paid content will be removed from the store since certain content can't be billed anymore.
This is another non-comprehensible move by Nokia with China being an important sales-market for applications. Instead of figuring out an acceptable solution they seem preferring to burden developers with that problem. Even though an application sold in China doesn't give the same income as being sold for example in Switzerland, the amount of downloads is considerable high in the Asian country. Nokia hasn't given detailed information about their decision other than the lost of billing support being a "side effect".
"Recently we are going to deploy an upgrade of store billing to improve the billing in China, but unfortunately as a side effect of this, we will lose billing support on N9, which means content on N9 can’t be billed in China anymore." - Nokia
But we can't only blame Nokia. China with their restricting government, always has been a difficult terrain for western billing companies and it wouldn't be the first time that developers have to find their own ways to generate an income. Developers for other systems (like Android) decided to make their applications advertisement-supported in order to reach users in markets, where a billing system wasn't available. But this method causes additional work for developers and it is questionable if such an effort pays off.
Chinese Nokia N9 users have been complaining already before the announcement that the billing procedure wasn't working well. Among others, this caused an increase of distributed pirated software on unofficial websites. For some developers nothing else will remain but to remove their software from the Chinese store or offer it for free.
"There is no action required but inform you about this. If you still wish to have your N9 content published into China, please make it a free version and resubmit it." - Nokia
Next to developers also Chinese N9 users are victims of the removed billing support. It might even affect users from other countries: Some software manufacturers might avoid an app store which isn't fully available on the Chinese market. The Nokia N9 is said be sold quiet well in China and it is confirmed that the unofficial successor Sailfish OS by Jolla has a big focus on the probably most potential, future smartphone market.
Nokia's unexpected and unexplained actions could even lead to the idea (or should we call it conspiracy theory?) of the now Microsoft-ruled Nokia trying to artificially downsizing the MeeGo popularity in China. It is one of Microsoft's big aims to gain ground on the Chinese mobile phone market with Windows Phone - any other smartphone system, even Nokia's own ones, would be a threat to the often called inferior Windows Phone.
Source of mentioned email: talk.maemo.org
