The Top “Made in China” Apps of 2010

In the year 1405, the Chinese Emperor sent Admiral Zheng He on expeditions to foreign lands to establish Chinese presence and extend the empire’s tributary system. 605 years later, the current empire is exporting byte-sized “Made in China” action packs of its own to the West.

No, not Jackie Chan.

So I present to you, the Top* Made in China apps of 2010! Most of these developers speak little English, but have come up with worthy apps that have served global audiences very well.

High Noon by HappyLatte

(Personal favourite!) High Noon is a real-time multiplayer Cowboy-style 2D shooter, that is developed by a team in the Chinese capital of Beijing. This app is free for download, but has achieved great success via virtual goods revenue to be amongst the top 10 grossing iPhone game of 2010 in 61 countries (Apple App Rewind 2010). The virtual dual currency system is well designed, with gold coins and a premium currency called Wampums. Even I contributed $4.99 to buy Wampums!

The High Noon team also carries out frequent and in-game festive promotions (such as Oktoberfest and Christmas) to sustain high user activity, where they reward active users with free Wampums.

From this High Noon app, all users have registered an email address with HappyLatte. This should prove very useful for the promotion of their future games.

Company website | Free version

Finger Balance by Coconut Island Studio

Finger Balance is a unique physics-based game where players would use 2 fingers to move a metal rod balancing a marble towards a target. The unique gameplay, coupled with a successful iPhone4 raffle campaign over YouTube and Twitter, enabled Finger Balance to top charts in several countries in Europe and Asia. The paid version also reached #6 on the US Paid Apps chart. The Coconut Island guys have also followed up with new content updates, including a level editor that allows users to express their creativity and generate new levels. This is especially impressive, following their phenomenal 7m downloads success from iDragPaper. This small humble team, made up of some ex-Konami developers, from Shanghai has taken time to develop a very unique and polished have proven that they’re not a one hit wonder, and are definitely a team to watch out for.

Company website | Free version | Paid version

TwitBird by NibiruTech

TwitBird is a twitter app that combines the best features from you’ve seen separately from other Twitter apps, into one app. It’s designed and developed from a software park in Chengdu, and has over a million downloads worldwide, with almost 900,000 Twitter followers. This is very impressive, for a developer based in a country where Twitter is not accessible via normal cables. For that purpose, this app even has in-built proxy connection servers.

Company Website | Free version | Pro version | Premium version

GameBox 1 by Triniti Interactive

GameBox, sold for $0.99, currently contains 37 games in 1 app, is the #7 Top Paid App on the Apple Rewind 2010 chart. The games bundled inside include individual game hits like iSniper3D, Ancient War, BowMan Defense, Chicks, Doodle Truck, and more. Apparently, Triniti has a sizable team that puts out some good games on the App Store every month, and as soon as the sales peak is past, the games are bundled into this GameBox.

When I met the founder and CEO, William Shi back in early 2010, he spoke of the desire to outsell the bigger publishers by offering quality and quantity, at $0.99. This seems to have worked very well so far, in light of EA’s move to slash prices and offer several top games at $0.99 recently.

Company website | Paid version

Haypi Kingdom by Haypi Co., Ltd

Haypi Kingdom boasts a unique formula of offense strategy, business acumen, and kingdom planning to make it stand out against the run-of-the-mill free MMORPGs. First released in February 2010, it has undergone several app and content updates, as well as fortnightly iPad giveaways to keep their user base excited, entertained and ever-growing. Currently it has over 2 million users in Europe and the US on iOS and Android, and is earning substantial in-app revenues.

Company website | Free version

Super Laser by EpicForce

Based in Hong Kong, this indie studio has developed one of the best flight shooter games on the App Store, doing their bit to revive this forgotten genre on iPhone screens. This game is very polished to the details with beautiful animations, unique weapons and cool power-ups. It also helps players that they designed a health bar instead of a conventional one-hit death in 1942/Raiden-style games. EpicForce has also benefited from a good relationship with mobile social gaming platform Plus+ to top charts in several countries.

Company website | Free version | Paid version

Kingdoms at War by A Thinking Ape

Kingdoms of War, developed by Mochi Media is a battle-focused MMORPG that users can play on the iPhone or on a browser. Mochi Media, based in San Francisco, had been acquired by Shanda Games for a whopping $80m in early 2010. It’s good to see that the backing from Shanda has borne some fruit in this game, which made it into the 2010 Rewind’s top grossing apps list.

Company website | Free version

Virtual Table Tennis by Wang Xi

As simple as it sounds, perfecting a virtual ping pong experience requires immense amounts of effort and expertise, especially so for this one-man developer based in Shanghai. Despite using only simple 3D graphics, the variations of bat power, speed, and swing direction, and the resulting effects on the ball, are amazingly realistic. According to industry mates, Wang Xi had spent one year developing and fine-tuning his game engine before he deemed it good enough for the App Store. For his very commendable commitment, he has been rewarded with chart-topping success on several country charts, and is currently working on multiplayer with GameCenter. This game is definitely a Trainyard-like success story in the making!

Facebook Page | Free version | Paid version

Do It(Tomorrow) by Adylitica Inc

Do It(Tomorrow) is a quite a marvel by itself – It’s a productivity app that helps users procrastinate! Because of the very simple way it’s designed, it actually helps get things done. There are only 2 screens – today’s tasks and tomorrow’s tasks. And for each task added on the present day, you can either strike it off as done, or push it to tomorrow’s list. This app is free, and has no ads, nor in-app purchases.

The key members of this company are actually foreigners based in Beijing. They are experienced technical professionals, who do hands-on coding. Such professionalism is hard to come by, since most western expats in Chinese IT companies do not function in hands-on coding capacities.

Company website | Free version

MSN Live Messenger by 9thQ

As official as the app name looks, this MSN chat app is actually developed by a Beijing company, and has emerged as one of the top MSN chat apps on the App Store. The app comes with push notifications, avatars, group chat, and emoticons support that makes it a complete MSN chat offering. 9thQ’s founding team is made up from ex-executives from another a mobile games company, the Beijing Colorme Group, who left to form a new company focused on productivity apps.

Company website | Free version | Paid version

The Monkeys Who Tried to Catch the Moon by Rye Studio

Rye Studio develops excellent storybook apps for children with professional multilingual narration. As niched as the children education category is, this little story app achieved almost 200,000 downloads worldwide. With other titles like Mulan, Nezha, The Beast Nian, Rye Studio is definitely doing a great job exporting Chinese classics to the west with Apple products.

So what happened to the monkeys who tried to catch the moon?

Company website | Free version | Paid version

In summary, it has been a breakthrough year for “Made in China” apps. This will only serve to educate more talented developers about the potential in this space, and inspire them to create innovative apps that would compete against the best apps from the rest of the world in 2011. Hopefully, this post can also encourage more Western media to shine spotlight on these made in China apps, to help more of them fulfill their potential in 2011. 给力！

*Top: In my previous employment I had the opportunity to come into contact with most prominent developers in China, so the merit is based on my personal knowledge and research. This listing of apps is not affiliated to Apple’s Rewind 2010 chart of apps.