iPhone in China, info for developers

What do we know?

• The 3G & 3Gs (not actually confirmed yet - only reports are of 8Gb & 16Gb, so this could be either 2x3G or 1x3G & 1x3Gs) are coming (going?) to China Q4 2009.
• They'll be available on Unicom, China's second-largest carrier with 140m customers.
• The deal isn't exclusive to Unicom, although nothing else has been announced yet (China Mobile does have 500m customers though - we can suppose they'll be next).
• Expectations of units shifted by 2011 are between 2m and 5m (Unicom have purchased 5m and there are already 1.5m gray market devices in use).
• Expectations of cost to consumer are between $100 and $400 (earnings per customer are lower for Unicom than AT&T).
• There won't be any WiFi (to comply with nonsense restrictions in China due to the WAPI / 802.11 dispute).

More on all the above at Reuters India and Wired.

And Apple's Chinese iPhone site is already up.

What does this mean for iPhone devs?

• Lots more customers, obviously.
• Well, maybe not quite - there are rumours of a Unicom-specific App Store. I can't see Apple letting this happen though and there's nothing substantiated.
• There are no specific age ratings in China, but there are restrictions - WOW's not allowed red blood, piles of bones or icons that feature skulls. And C&C's certainly out - no "damaging the nations's glory".
• General consensus is that Chinese gamers prefer free-to-play games supported by in-game purchases and advertising (Apple - sort this out! we need to offer paid DLC in free apps).
• Online gaming, which is more established than mobile gaming is an $8.9b market, with 77% of that being made up by MMOs, casual gaming the rest.
• Fantasy Westward Journey is the country's most popular game - an MMORPG. It has something in the region of 25m registered users and up to 1.5m concurrent players at any time.