Alibaba Group Holding 's video gaming unit will withdraw its flagship mobile title from the app store of smartphone maker Vivo , months after Tencent Holdings pulled its mobile game from several Android app stores.

The cooperation between strategy game Three Kingdoms Tactics and the Vivo app store had ended, Alibaba's Lingxi Games said in a statement published earlier this week, without elaborating on the reason. The game will be removed on March 7, and users will no longer be able to log into the game through Vivo's app store, according to the notice.

The Guangzhou-based studio apologised to players for the inconvenience. Users can apply for refund of unused game credits, the company said.

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Vivo declined to comment on Friday. Lingxi, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2017, referred the South China Morning Post to its earlier statement. Alibaba owns the Post.

A Vivo store in Shenzhen, China's southern Guangdong province. Photo: Roy Issa alt=A Vivo store in Shenzhen, China's southern Guangdong province. Photo: Roy Issa>

Launched in 2019, Three Kingdoms Tactics has been a commercial success, raking in more than US$1 billion in the first two years of release. It was the eighth-highest-grossing mobile game in Apple's China App Store last November, helping Lingxi secure the fifth spot among Chinese mobile game companies ranked by global revenue, according to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower.

The break-up follows Tencent's withdrawal of its hit game Dungeon & Fighter Mobile from the app stores of a number of major Android smartphone vendors last year, including Vivo, Oppo and Huawei Technologies. Their cooperation ended less than a month after the game's launch in May.

This comes amid ongoing disputes between Chinese game companies and smartphone brands over so-called Android and Apple taxes, which are the commission rates charged by app store operators to use their platforms and payment systems.

"Withdrawing from Android channels could be a way to protest against and strive for a reduction in Android taxes for the gaming companies, especially those who are in urgent need of revenue increase," said Zhang Shule, an analyst at CBJ Think Tank.

It is possible that the fees charged by Android smartphone vendors have become so high that even big companies like Tencent and NetEase are "suffering", according to Zhang.