The trend of building homegrown mobile Operating Systems (OS) is on the rise in China, as detailed in IDC's latest research.

The report says that this is a reflection of China's still-developing mobility market, where Chinese consumers are more accustomed to the indigenous online services produced by local firms. As a result, Chinese homegrown OS integrate these services as their core competitive advantage over their western peers. IDC believes that while these will catch the eye of many Chinese consumers, it is also speculated that some of these homegrown OS players will be short-lived, leaving only a few dominant players to go head to head with the western heavyweights in China.

"The emergence of homegrown Chinese OS is also a manifestation of the market players' intense desire to build fences and drive stakes into the ground of the booming PRC smartphone market. Many of these developers are utilizing homegrown OS as a platform to create additional revenue streams," says Ian Song, Research Manager of IDC's Asia/Pacific Client Devices Research.

The homegrown OS, as many of its developers believe, will become instrumental in bridging traditional mobile phone users to smartphone usage. By localizing the user environment and integrating services that Chinese consumers are accustomed to, these OS can drive more data usage, speed up the development of mobile technology, and thus help China mobility market catch up with the rest of the world.

IDC foresees smartphone shipments in China to eclipse that of feature phones by 2013.

In fact, 2012 is turning out to be the inflection point, as only 8 million more feature phones will be shipped compared with smartphone shipments; this is out of a total of more than 280 million feature phones and smartphone that was forecast to be shipped in 2012. Part of the accelerated smartphone growth is due to the push to deploy more 3G-enabled devices into China's market. For carriers, the opportunity lies in converting traditional feature phone users to the smartphone platform, where higher-priced plans and average revenue per user (ARPU) will continue to grow.

"Although many locally developed Chinese mobile OS are thinly disguised attempts at increasing the vendors' bottom-line, there are gems in this group that truly shine. These vendors know that having a great OS is half the battle," concludes Ian.

Note: Companies covered in this research include Alibaba Group, Baidu, China Mobile, China Unicom, Dell, Lenovo, Shanda Interactive Entertainment.