
Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi - karimf
https://www.wired.com/story/behind-the-fall-and-rise-of-china-xiaomi/
======
ksec
The success of Xiaomi was really about their price to performance ratio. Which
they have been marketing it since its inception. They have been making phones
with close to zero profits, and the business was only sustainable when they
continue to have VC and money from Government (direct or not) pouring in. The
trouble in the ~2014/2015 era was when they tried to make profit, because they
have been growing so fast, with so many users they thought their brand has
already capture certain mindset. A perfect storm happened as Huawei and Oppo
ViVo were dialling up their competitiveness, not to mention their cheekiness (
or may be they really think they are ) against Apple.

So in 2015 ish news was they are running out of cash, and things turn south.
But Xiaomi was lucky in that they realize their problem a lot earlier, make
changes and keep them a float. And the new Xiaomi is now better and becomes
more humble. Compared that to LeTV and LeEco.

Now they have been in talks with many 4G patents holders, once those are
settled they will likely enter US and EU market*. ( Hence this PR article )

P.S - Even though you buy Xiaomi's hardware, you really should do yourself a
flavour and install clean Android on it.

~~~
Pixeleen
Is there a television available from any manufacturer where one can install a
clean Android (not a rootkit)?

~~~
donjoe
Umidigi comes with a clean Android by default.

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Nitishshah700
I currently owns a redmi note 4, Indian version

the hardware is great.

price is good,

but the software it's literally a spyware/adware, even after removing all the
chinese crapware and preinstall adware from the stock rom there are still
trying to send my data back to there chinese server,since removing some of
there system app will crash the stock rom

[https://imgur.com/a/mlcgq](https://imgur.com/a/mlcgq)

So if you are thinking of using stock rom, your privacy is at great risk.

~~~
monksy
What app is that for the firewall?

~~~
Nitishshah700
AFwall+

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xorcist
Puff piece aside, Xiaomi is one of the Chinese brands that are usable outside
the country.

Their Snapdragon based Mi flagships are lightweight (lots of plastic around a
thin metallic frame, which in my opinion is the sensible way to design a
phone) with good screens and crappy cameras. The LineageOS port is well
developed and has been my daily device for about a year now.

Installing LineageOS was trivial once you unlocked the bootloader, which was
the only roadblock since the instructions were outdated, but at no point
required reading Chinese. It involved giving them a phone number that could
receive SMS but a temporary number and throwaway email worked. People joke
about how much spyware is on the phone, which is a possbility, but outside the
application processor I fail to see why there would be more than other
manufacturers.

Their Intel based Macbook clones are also well built and runs Debian sid
without any surprises.

This is probably how the Chinese brands will move up the value chain in the
western hemisphere. Not by launching new brands but by direct consumer sales
to people who buy from digital marketplaces anyway.

~~~
kuwze
I'd like to say that Huawei also is supported outside of the country, to the
point that you can easily by a Matebook X on Amazon. There was a discussion
about how installing OpenBSD on it[0].

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14782435)

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gravypod
I wish there was a good catalog of Chinese devices we could import to America.
One of my friends can read Chinese and showed me a color E-ink note taking
tablet that's available in China that was similar to reMarkable. That's
something I'd love to get my hands on. I'm sure there are many other nuggets
from China that don't make their way over here for the general consumer market
that some people would love to buy.

~~~
dis-sys
patents is the problem. once they set foot in America, those Chinese companies
are going to be sued in federal court for patent right violation or asked to
pay royalty higher than their current profit margin.

~~~
gravypod
Would it be illegal to take a vacation in China and pick the cool gadgets of
China up and bring them back home?

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mathperson
Is this article paid advertising by Xiaomi? It feels very suspicious

~~~
josephpmay
It’s a PR-driven interest piece, like a lot of what Wired and similar
publications publish

[0]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

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goombastic
Way too much information leakage from its mobile OS (MiUI?) back to China
though.

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thisisit
This article is very bad by wired standards. Things I noticed:

> To find the answers to these questions, we have to go back to Xiaomi’s
> 2015-2016 debacle, which saw smartphone sales decline to a rumored 41
> million in 2016, from a reported 70 million a year earlier.

As if one year is enough to proclaim a company's fall and rise. Businesses run
on multi year cycle and 1 down year might be a small blip. Additionally, if
the lower sale numbers were just _rumors_ , there was no "fall" of Xiaomi, was
there?

> Today, Xiaomi is being called a “Chinese phoenix.”

What is the source?

And there are so many editing mistakes:

> These include hundreds of thousands of hours of movies and shows — available
> a la carte or via an all-you-can-eat $7.50 monthly fee

Eat?

> Adding the word ‘connected’ to a _range of appliances doesn 't a smart home
> make_ — even Apple hasn't pulled off that trick yet.

~~~
jpatokal
The initial assessment is quite accurate, since the mobile phone hardware
market is _brutal_. The list of companies that were once great but stumbled
and were unable to recover is lengthy: Motorola, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia,
HTC...

~~~
thisisit
Sure, but everyone of those faltered after _years_ in the business and not
after just one year in decreased sales.

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pingec
I like running stock Android and was considering buying Google Pixel 2 but it
does not have a dual sim option which is a deal-breaker for me. I ended up
buying Xiaomi mi A1 which runs stock android. I love it. There is one downside
- the really bad camera and is probably the reason I will jump ship again when
a worthy product comes out.

I would gladly pay an extra $100 or $200 for a Xiaomi mi A1 second edition
with a great optically stabilized camera and NFC.

It's a shame because this phone proves it is possible to build a great phone
for little money, fix a few little things and you end up with a phone that can
compete with flagships that are two or three times more expensive. That might
not be in Xiaomi's interest though.

~~~
nicolas_t
The camera issue is why I got a Huawei instead of a Xiaomi. Xiaomi phones are
nice but they all tend to have rather bad cameras.

I do use a lot of non-phone xiaomi stuff though, they tend to be pretty decent
at a great price

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textor
Xiaomi dynamics are about as unpredictive of its future success as a given
cryptocurrency's exchange rate. At least there's less buzz here.

Xiaomi has a reasonable average quality and a few consistently interesting
product lines (I myself enjoy using Mi 5s and will probably change it for Mi
7), and a ton of... strange... gimmicks. When they were being enthusiastically
buried by various news outlets, I didn't consider it a real thing, neither do
I put any stock in this renaissance. I would be a little surprised if they go
bankrupt in 5 years, somewhat less so if they displace Huawei. They already
have earned a certain place in market.

~~~
monksy
What do you think of the Meizu line?

~~~
textor
Sometimes beautiful hardware design, questionable performance (in Mediatek
models), great audio, poor battery life and camera, their OS is full of neat
gimmicks. Meizu isn't on top of their game lately, their best phones were
perhaps MX3-4, now they seem a bit pricey for the offered specs compared to
Xiaomi.

Incidentally I have their headphones (HD50), very satisfied (except faux
leather is tearing too easily).

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dingo_bat
The only redeeming feature of Xiaomi phones is the price. It feels cheap in
the hand, design is a very detailed rip-off of the latest iphone, software is
horrid, hardware is unreliable (shaky gps, loose sim cards, etc.), battery
life is mediocre. But it costs 1/4 of similarly spec'ed phone from Samsung.

~~~
jdietrich
The Redmi phones are 95% as good as a flagship for 25% of the cost. The Mi
phones _are_ flagships, for about half the price of something from Samsung or
Apple. That's a remarkable selling point and it's the basis of the Xiaomi
brand. If you pay any less, you're probably going to get a substandard
product. If you pay more, it's not always obvious what you're getting for your
money. Xiaomi represent the platonic ideal of mid-range.

The Miui OS is hugely popular, for good reason. It has quirks and quality
issues like any other phone OS, but it also packages a stock-ish Android
experience with a ton of very useful features and a bare minimum of bloat.
Updates are regular as clockwork, even on older devices.

Indian and Chinese consumers might want an iPhone or a Galaxy S8, but they're
overwhelmingly buying Xiaomi devices. Western brands should be seriously
worried about the threat that Xiaomi represent to their fat margins.

~~~
yummy
MIUI is garbage, just like any Chinese software. It's the most bloated mobile
OS I've ever used. WiFi tethering got broken after some update, which is
ridiculous. Bluetooth tethering never worked at all. Memory leaks are so bad
you can't keep two apps in background after 5-7 days of uptime. And that's
with 3gb of RAM. They even had to add some swap space to make it usable, but
at least you can turn it off, which is called "Memory optimization" for some
reason. Plus, you have to register a MIUI account to turn on developer
settings. I'm not even talking about silly UI bugs. Basically any non-stock
ROM is better

~~~
jdietrich
I haven't experienced any of the memory issues you describe. I have heard
complaints about memory utilisation in previous versions of Miui, but I
haven't seen evidence of major leaks.

You don't have to register a Miui account to turn on developer options - you
just tap "Miui version" in the "about phone" dialog seven times. It's a
slightly eccentric UI decision, but I understand that it's intended to protect
naive users against shooting themselves in the foot. You do need to register a
Miui account to unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM, which isn't an
entirely unreasonable security measure.

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chx
No doubt Xiaomi has the best price/value USB C - DisplayPort converter but try
to get the technical details (maximum amperage on the two USB A when power is
plugged in / power is not plugged in) and you will hit a brick wall. Both the
US and HK customer service essentially told me to get lost.

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LaPrometheus
I don't see any of the commenters here understand why Xiaomi rise again, and
ironically the author of this article.

Xiaomi is like Amazon in China's smart home market, except with a much
stronger mobile department that Amazon would dream to get.

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songco
Xiaomi grocery store

