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."

Comments

Amateurs

[McFortner]

Everybody knows that what they should have done was fake the results like every other company does.

I don't think many MIUI users voted...

[Ecuador]

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.