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Chinese Phone Maker Xiaomi Deletes a Public MIUI vs Android One Twitter Poll After Voting Didn't Go Its Way (betanews.com)
Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, which sells handsets at razor thin margins, is increasingly dominating in its home market and emerging places such as India and Indonesia. To make money, the company relies on a range of homegrown software features in its Android-based MIUI operating system. In a surprising move earlier this week, the company asked its Twitter followers to choose between MIUI and Android One (which runs pure Android OS). Things didn't go as it had planned. From a report: Presumably the company was rather hoping that Twitter users would vote for its own MIUI which it could then rub in Google's face -- but the poll actually went against Xiaomi. Rather than leave the results of the vote up for anyone to see, the company decided to simply delete it and pretend it never happened. Take a look at the Xiaomi account on Twitter, and you'll see no hint that any such poll has ever taken place. But over on Reddit, there's a thread which was started by someone posting a link to the poll. In the comments, one Redditor noticed after a period of voting that: "So far it's 53-47 for android one."
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Strange. To me, 53-47 for Android One is huge win for Xiaomi flavored OS. That's a small spread. Xiaomi is close.
Try the poll with Microsoft's OS vs Android. Then you will see what losing looks like.
Tighten up that headline guys, holy cow. Here, try this: Chinese Phone Maker Xiaomi Deleted a Twitter Poll
Get to the nitty-gritty instead of baiting for clicks, put the rest in the summary. Geez.
I prefer the Android ROMs without GPL violations.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Twitter is banned in China. How did Xiaomi do this?
Their MIUI is a joke anyway, it's as close as they can get to ripping off Apple and implementing it in Android. They got banned from XDA-developers.com for refusing to follow the GPL and release the source code modifications they made. Their official forums are godawful and difficult to read or follow.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Everybody knows that what they should have done was fake the results like every other company does.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
Xiaomi is the chinese equivalent of Samsung. They make EVERYTHING, from phones to air conditioners, from robot vacuums to RGB light bulbs.
In a couple of years we'll see much more of this company. Their products are actually quite good. So far i've used their dirt-cheap "smart plugs" and the incredibily niche but super cool "air conditioner companion" (a device to turn your regular remote control based AC into a "smart" air conditioner).
So far they seem to be China-only with their products. But soon we'll see more of them.
Most Xiaomi users I know (and I happen to know quite a lot since they are getting popular in Europe) really like MIUI and it is one of the reasons they choose the these phones. In fact, a cousin was telling me yesterday me how disappointed she was by the changes in the OS when she updated from her older Xiaomi to a newer one. Which one did you get I asked her... The Mi A1 she tells me...
I had to explain that with the only Xiaomi Android One phone she has some advantages over MIUI users - e.g. the first one to get new releases, snooping only by Google instead of Google+Xiaomi etc, things that some people value greatly, but, from my experience they are not the majority so I'd bet most Twitter voters would not have been MIUI or even Android One users - never mind having tried both.
Personally, I choose phones mostly for the hardware, as long as the Android flavour is not annoying (I don't mind MIUI), and my current Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 is the first phone that I really like, since quite a while now (I'd probably say since my Nokia N9 with Maemo/Meego back in 2011) - I am staying away from Samsung after some disappointments...
That said, the open poll was a stupid move, the deletion was an even stupider one.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Anyone who has ever tried to have a "customer relationship" with a Chinese company, knows this. ... (Our blame culture VS their shame culture. Our antisocial attitudes VS their concept of "face".) ... But also due to the totalitarian government. Something that will soon be the case around here too.
The communication is a nightmare. Partially due to the differences in basic culture
The mindset is now, that blatant censorship (aka 'moderation') is totally OK, including shadowbanning and vanishing anyone who questions it, except when that would reveal the methods. Same thing with blatant surveillance and being a data kraken is too, but we can't tell anymore, because it's just the same here now. (E.g. anything and all related to Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.)
Another difference is that they want to play it so that still look good in the official public view. While in our society, corporations couldn't give a crap about hiding that anymore, and hence don't hide it. (Their strategy is to rather influence what people think and want in the first place. Which is still too "next-gen" for China, and also not that necessary, since people are way more conformist and less individualist over there.)
That's why I generally don't buy anything East-Asian, unless I have some local proxy that completely shields me from it. (So if they don't do their RMA relatively locally, in my country or one next to my country, it's no deal.)
Oh wait! Same thing!
XiaoMi the results, baby, but show me...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I can confirm anecdotally the popularity of their Xiaomi Mi A1, which as the code name suggests, is the one Xiaomi model that comes with Android One. Stocks have been low locally (SEA) since December to the point where shops have begun to sell the Mi 5X, the mainland China variant that comes with MIUI. In fact, there are hacks that enable the loading of the Android One ROM, if you can somehow bypass the locked bootloader.
I'm sure Google would be heartbroken to find people prefer a slightly modified version of their software more than their software. I mean how much of it does Xiaomi think they even created, every security patch is straight from Google which they lap up, imagine what they'd do if Google didnt release the sources.
I guess some people are kinda sensitive.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you do not choose how we like, we will destroy the poll and GIVE YOU the solution WE KNOW you like best!
What could be more free?
That shit may go over in China.
Pretty much everywhere else, it has people wiping their ass with your product and mailing it back to you Collect On Delivery.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
surely no-one actually believes the "Russia Collusion" investigations are phony? or unfounded? no-one could be that far out of touch with reality and be able to breathe without verbal prompts?
If the results are truly representative of their market, it would vindicate their business strategy.
Sure, most prefer the multi-vendor Android ecosystem.
If however 47% are happy to buy into lock-in, then Xiaomi's investment in the platform is well justified for a future of cranking up the margin without seeing all their customers jump ship.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They sell far more handsets than Google and its Indian OEMs so they're ahead in the ultimate popularity poll, sales. Almost nobody buys Android one phones, they buy Samsung, Asus, Sony, Huawai, Xiomi with they're own version modified Android and quite frankly the shit I hate about Android is the Google part.
For example, Take a TV box, click Google Play, sign up for account, and try to select the Mr Miss etc. using a mouse and keyboard in the drop down combo of Android on Google Play. The drop down combo box IN GOOGLE PLAY do not support mouse or keyboard. You cannot click to select items in the drop down, and cannot press up down and enter to select the item with the keyboard.
For example: Pull up you tube in a browser, play a video, the screen times out, press on again, the page reloads, the video you're watching reverts to the first in the sequence playing, it's totally forgotten what you were doing or where you were. That's Google unloaded everything. That's a GOOGLE feature. As they try to force the ram requirement down, they're force unloading everything and the browser is supposed to save the web page state in microdetail (and any connection to the server is supposed to be store away). Google's Android unloads the browser, and by magic this is all supposed to be fixed up when you turn the screen back on, in zero time. i.e. incompetent Google thinking meets real world suck.
IMHO, what's needed is a fork of Android by a competent body. A LibreOffice moment.
That's incredibly bad if the vote wasn't completely against MIUI, which was basically born as a total iOS rip off.
But I imagine the vast majority of voters cannot see past the superficial UI... they'll choose whatever they are more used to, or that makes more usability sense to them personally, discarding the fact that you can pretty much emulate whatever MIUI has with stock Android.
Nevermind the fact that Android One is more secure, will always receive updates first, and has some guarantees in place to avoid telemetry and stuff.
I'd love to see the entire mid range to low end class get either Android One or Android Go. It's the only thing that still makes me consider a Pixel phone sometimes, because I really don't think what they are offering over the mid-rangers worth double the price or more.
As for Xiaomi, I got my mom a Mi A1 Android One version. Didn't test it too much just yet, but so far so good.
It seems to me that some development-minded person came up with the idea for this, realizing that any significant showing would in actuality be a really big win for them, even if they lost and since they got to select the sample set (their followers on twitter), it seemed there was no way they wouldn't get a good result. So they made the poll and posted it on twitter.
And that is sound logic IF you understand that getting 47% in a poll against a globally-dominant brand is in fact a really good result.
Unfortunately, that's not a number marketing can really work with. Marketing needs a simple message. You can't say "we made a really good showing against a dominant brand." You have to be able to say say "we won" or there's no use spending any time on it. So someone in marketing saw the twitter poll and they decided that even though they'd get some heat in the short-term, ultimately it would be best to just delete it and pretend it didn't happen.
I use a Xiaomi phone and one of the benefits is that it comes with MIUI rather than Android, mostly because of the superior user interface. I suspect Xiaomi were very confident in their superior user experience, particularly since Google have made such a mess of Android, so they posted this poll. I also suspect most of the people voting having used MIUI and were voting because they don't like handset makers modifying Android. If you actually use MIUI you'll never touch an Android phone again.
So what?
NOBODY cares, at least enough to vote.
Buyers count by millions.
They can offer a model with both options and let the buyers choose.
That is the real poll.
And if they offer one with Sailfish or even better pure GNU with an isolated Android layer in chroot container or whatever method they consider is better I will buy one for sure.
Because I owned a Note 2 with MIUI 9 until a few weeks ago, then I switched to a Umidigi which is almost Android and, while the phone is better, the only thing I want is MIUI. MIUI is a much more accurate behavior. Let's say MIUI vs Stock Android is like a top-of-the-range car vs a city car
Not sure why the headline felt the need to mention that this company is Chinese though. What relevance does it have?
Yes; good question. This isn't a war, where the arms supplier makes a difference. These are phones, FFS. If you aren't even aware that Xiaomi is a Chinese firm by now, go crawl back underneath that rock from whence you came. Or get some sun once in a while, the food isn't the cause of that stench in the basement of your mom's dwelling. Wash those socks, too, before they become capable of standing upright-- on their own.tentacle
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.