Tencent, the largest Chinese ISP, is getting increasingly aggressive when it comes to the mobile business.

It's signed deals with Japanese mobile social gaming platform GREE, launched a $100 million Android app investment fund with GREE and KDDI, and spoken about its plans to invest significantly in mobile.

Point of sale

One result is that it's announced an internet-based app distribution platform.

Called the Tencent Application Center, and evolved from a previous platform, it will enable developers to release content for internet, WAP and via native apps across multiple OSes, such as Android, Symbian, Java, Windows Phone, and apparently even iOS.

Tencent's massive advantage in China is that its QQ IM client has almost 700 million users, and potentially enables it to create a powerful social layer for the games and app distributed via its center. It's also released its own QQ handsets.

The company says it will help fund the best developers through its existing development funds.

However, there's some concern how open the center will be. 80 percent of downloads on Tencent's previous platform were of internal content, making it a hard sell for thirdparties.

[source: Want China Times via Distimo]