| Hi all, it's Zheping in Hong Kong. The words "app store" appeared 340 times in the U.S. congressional report accusing Big Tech of abusing its market power. The report, which came out on Tuesday, cited complaints of developers like Epic Games Inc., which have been lobbying Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google to scale back the 30% cut they take on app-related payments. The paper also laid out proposals to unwind the companies' "monopoly power" over app distribution. But in China, a 30% cut of app sales sounds pretty good. While app makers the world over have been deriding Apple and Google's share as an unfair and unwarranted tax, Chinese Android stores frequently take cuts of about 50%. Now, a handful of Chinese developers have started the fight to push their revenue split down to the global standard. In recent weeks, two Chinese gaming startups, Lilith Games and miHoYo, said they won't sell their would-be autumn hits via app stores pre-installed on smartphones made by Huawei and Xiaomi. Instead, they've opted for stores charging smaller fees or none at all—including Apple's App Store, which levies the same 30% charge in China as it does everywhere else. While the duo didn't say outright they were unhappy about the 50% rule set by the Chinese Android stores, many gamers and developers see them as the good guys stepping up against tech's behemoths. Why do Chinese app stores charge so much? For starters, local vendors are dominant in the country's smartphone market, with the iPhone making up just 8% of sales in the June quarter. Google Play doesn't exist, so the pre-installed mobile stores of Chinese smartphone makers become the first choice for more than half a billion Android users. That's made it easier for companies like Huawei Technologies Co., Xiaomi Corp. and Oppo to take a larger share of revenue. App developers in China don't have much say in this. Some of the largest game makers, Tencent Holdings Ltd. included, have the heft to negotiate deals for their top titles, but even those efforts have had mixed success. One reason is that, particularly when it comes to games, marketing and publishing deals have long mattered more than the content itself. China is the world's largest gaming market, but fans frequently download what's been pushed to them rather than seek out specific titles. Few developers share Tencent's ability to push games to more than a billion people via viral social networks like WeChat. Lilith and miHoYo are betting on evolving consumer behaviors. Initial data show they are doing okay without the Chinese Android phone makers, despite not listing on the main app stores. Since launching at the end of September, Lilith's Rise of Kingdoms and miHoYo's Genshin Impact have generated a combined $50 million in player spending on Apple's Chinese app store, where both titles are among the top 10 grossing apps, according to Sensor Tower. It's still too early to tell whether other Chinese game makers will follow their lead—or those of American app developers—in waging war against the app stores. But it does look like global distribution of mobile app profits could be shaken up for the first time in a while. —Zheping Huang | 
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