Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi | Hacker News Reader

Behind the fall and rise of China's Xiaomi

wired.com

49 pointskarimf48 comments

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.

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

Umidigi comes with a clean Android by default.

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

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

What app is that for the firewall?

AFwall+

You might want to flash a custom rom. LineageOS is quite popular these days.

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.

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

Can you tell us what country you are in? If the US, who supports the phone?

Thanks!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Not sure what your issues #3 and #4 are. All-you-can-eat and a la carte are both ways of ordering food, and it's common to use the parlance to refer to subscriptions services. The slightly unusual grammar in #4 is perfectly valid.

Well, #3 references food for sure but people don't use metaphors as it is across industries. I don't "eat" movies and shows rather watch it. So, in my opinion at least, it should be all-you-can-watch.

In case of #4, it's just slightly unusual grammar? It should be - range of appliances doesn't make a smart home rather than range of appliances doesn't a smart home make.

English is not my native language but the article was still a painful read.

#4 is correct. It's a figure of speech.

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/90141/a-doesnt-a-goo...

"English is not my native language"

English *is" my native language. I assure you both #3 and #4 follow accepted usage patterns.

Examples of #4: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/one_swallow_does_not_a_summ...

Example of #3: http://support.three.co.uk/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBISAPI.DLL?Command...

"but people don't use metaphors as it is across industries"

When I was in primary (elementary) school, I was taught that a simile is when you say 'x is like y' and a metaphor is when you say 'x is [an example of] y' even when it's not literally true. (Back then, the word 'literally' meant something like 'technically correct', although I understand that its meaning has changed now.)

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...

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

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.

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

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.

What do you think of the Meizu line?

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).

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.

> detailed rip-off of the latest iphone

Mi Mix 2 looks way nicer than iPhone X.

And iPhones are actually late comers for this bezel less trend. Sharp starts it, but it is Mi Mix 1 really advertises this idea to the market.

You're right, but I am talking about the rest of their phones which have actually sold in huge numbers and contributed to the "rise" of xiaomi.

Please compare the highest end Xiaomi phone with an iPhone. Not their low cost phones

But it's the low cost ones that have contributed to the "rise" of xiaomi referenced in TFA. The high cost ones nobody is buying.

What is this "rest"? Are you really convinced this is a correct generalization? What about Mi 5, Mi Mix, 4C/A/X, can you show what they copied? Their first well-known phones barely had any design to speak of, and the same could be said for modern Redmi Notes etc.

Loose sim cards, really? I've had experience with 6 Xiaomi phones to date and never noticed that. Shaky GPS? Yes, this happened on one bottom-line Redmi, but it's hardly pervasive as far as I can tell. Software is debatable – it's not Pixel experience, I'll concede, but also definitely not TouchWiz. Battery is on average better than for most Chinese brands or for Apple, though inferior to, say, LG and Samsung. (One actual issue: camera performance is varying, typically it's bad without customization).

I won't argue that at least some models are clearly very closely copying a major brand (for instance, MiA1 is openly compared to iPhone, Mi Note 2 has Samsung S6 design), but this does not appear to be a crucial part of their business strategy (unlike the more abstract "Chinese Apple/cheap Samsung" sales pitch), and comments like yours strike me as repating a vague stereotype. In the post-iPhone era, striking design originality is rare to find, and Xiaomi doesn't seem more prone to copying than most others. They jump on the bandwagon as soon as the new technology becomes available/popular, and that's about it.

That seems like a very sweeping statement for a company that makes wide range of profucts. E.g. the 150 eur RedMi 4X has excellent build quality and battery life that easily beats any iPhone by days.

I don't own one, but I've read Xiaomi provide regular software updates. As a Motorola G4 owner stuck on the Android March 2017 update, that's attractive.

Believe me, you don't want Xiaomi's "updates". The base OS is bad, and the updates usually break already working stuffs. I had an issue where I couldn't use photos from Google photos as my whatsapp profile photo. Unlimited small headaches like this.

Are you paid by some other company to post?

No, I'm just a dissatisfied customer. Don't want others to fall into the same trap I did.

Check out lineageos. In 15 min you can be runniing latest Android without any junk.

I have a Mi 5s and the build quality is much better than any of the Samsung phones that I have ever owned and the price was just HK$3k for a very powerful phone. Many of the imports into the West are fake and it's usually best to buy them from a Xiaomi store, which I admit is just a ripoff of the Apple store.

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.

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

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.

The MiOS or whatever they call it is utter crap. Frankly, it turned me off from a perfectly good Redmi Note phone. IMO, the low price is very alluring but the software should be at least as good as plain android. A good example is oneplus. I believe people have bought mi phones in india a lot due to the media blitz, but these numbers will not be sustainable because nobody will buy a phone from them a second time.

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.

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.

Xiaomi grocery store

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