Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoi | Hacker News Reader

The article has a bit of American Bias towards it (probably because it's the NY Times).

Xiaomi have developed their own UI (with some similaroties to Apple) called MIUI which you can download and install on your Android if you wish. They are galvanizing the market in China because they are pushing home the 'China-built, High standard' message. In other words, they are playing the patriotism button and in the main, it's working.

The main issue is whether they can push beyond China.

View on HN

Woah, Xiaomi is behind MIUI? I had no idea. I'm impressed, it's refreshing to see Chinese tech companies pushing innovation and quality to compete instead of half-assed clones.

It should be noted that MIUI is also a rampant GPL violator. They have taken a lot of open source stuff under the GPL, among other licenses, and closed it off or even claimed as their own. This probably isn't shocking given the article.

http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/11/android-community-demand...

"A lot" and "rampant" seem like exaggerations. Based on that link, most of MIUI's changes are to the Android source code, which licensed under the permissive Apache license.

Only their modifications to the linux kernel need to comply with the GPL license.

edit: Here is the relevant quote from the parent's link

>While the kernel modifications [to the GPL licensed Linux kernel] are only a small part of the modifications Xioami has done to create MIUI, it does include the low-level work Xioami has done to push things like performance and energy efficiency.

If you were to look hard enough, you'd see that you can find plenty of MIUI source code for kernels, patches, etc... Most of the documentation is in Chinese, and the websites aren't in English either, but they seem to comply with their GPL requirements.

They also aren't obligated to release the source for all the Android modifications (Apache licensed).

In the 1st tier cities at least, Xiaomi's are phones you buy if you can't afford a Samsung or iPhone. I have yet to see one of my friends with one. Honestly, for value + good design, Nokia's Asha phones would be a better choice. We are thinking about getting my wife's mom one since she finds her Chinese-brand Android phone too hard to use.

I have one. They just cloned some of iOS with even a similar form factor. This is pretty much what the article is about. Theming is probably the biggest innovation.

Thanks for pointing that out, while I was reading the article I was wondering how they could brand themselves as apple-like when they must surely be selling and Android phone.

It's sad that every tech story about China has to be given an anti-Chinese spin, to the extent that the tech angle is completely overlooked.

Especially the NYT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5755627

Is it a issue if they don't push beyond China just yet? Maybe they can sell a lot of these devices to a inspired domestic market, and once they have enough clout release a device with Apple level quality to the whole world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com