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I just came back from China, in which most of the phones I used did not have Google Play, or Play Services, and had replacements for everything. If you try to
by cromwellian 11y ago
I just came back from China, in which most of the phones I used did not have Google Play, or Play Services, and had replacements for everything.
If you try to use an phone with Google Play in China, you need a VPN, since if the app calls things like location services, it'll get blocked, for example, Taxi hailing apps could not retrieve the location, however with a native-phone, they work.
Needless to say, the experience of the fork of all of these services is inconsistent between devices and makes it less easy to move between phone vendors. One paradoxical outcome could be that you could get locked into XiaoMi, Huawei, etc.
Also, the experience of 9 different appstores is kind of jarring. I think it would be better if apps simply worked like the Web, and could be safe enough to stream-through and purchased through distributed payment systems.
- takno 11y agoI'd go back to a feature phone rather than locked into Xiaomi. Even with access to the Google apps it's a disaster area
- newjersey 11y agoI've never seen a xiaomi phone in person. It looks pretty good from the website. Care to elaborate about your experience?
- takno 11y agoThe phone is beautiful, but the OS is a weirdly ham fisted attempt to make android look like iOS. In the case of notifications for example they've restricted them to a single line and no in-notification buttons. Then they've added a bunch of apps that can't be disabled. I regularly get a notification that one of my sim cards (with no credit) cannot be activated, so they're trying to link to something I haven't asked for, and there's a loud daily notification that there is something called hidden folders which I should definitely want to know about. All of this is still stuck on android 4, even though the phone was released significantly after 5
- newjersey 11y agoThank you for your reply. It seems the mi 4 will get the marshmallow based miui 7 according to http://en.miui.com/thread-213606-1-1.html http://en.miui.com/thread-213606-1-1.html but clearly not for all devices especially the note. Can you get cyanogenmod or something?
- ralfd 11y agoInteresting. How does iOS work in China?