I’m using data from StatCounter, as mentioned in the figure. See Belarus and Russia. They could be wrong; their figures are based on website hits.

Fixed. Thanks!

LibreOffice + me trying to fix things and making it worse + svg to png conversion

You overestimate my artistic abilities. I took the default colour palette LibreOffice gave, and replaced a few with ones that clash less.

I mean, the biggest (or rather, only) reason I still use WhatsApp is that it works with (other people’s) WhatsApp.

Oh right, some of their assets were frozen, due to non-payment of tax. I thought you meant freezing all assets and kicking them out of the country, like what happened to Huawei.

To some extent, these might be routine tax evasion investigations. But there is definitely a pattern of certain Indian companies getting favourable treatment over foreign competitors. Whether this is a deliberate move, or just politicians shaking up businesses for hush money, I do not know.

It could just be small sample size giving a wrong result. These are based on website hits, not official sales figures.

Grey is ‘I couldn’t be arsed to look up this country; it’s tiny so I hope no one notices’.

Apple has ‘won’ a lot of countries with just 20-30% marketshare, because the Android market is so fragmented. Look at China, for example.

Major markets. The arrangement is whatever LibreOffice chose, which for some reason is reverse alphabetical order. Oh well, at least World comes first.

India has not frozen Xiaomi’s assets as far as I know. They got a pretty big fine for tax evasion (they said they were paying the tax in China, but weren’t, or something like that).

its attempts to stir up a China vs India culture war

All the viable alternatives to Xiaomi (Oppo, Vivo, Realme, etc.) are also Chinese, so this doesn’t really matter. Now these companies are challenging Xiaomi, but they’re doing it by offering comparable performance to price ratio and better cameras. Also, Xiaomi has conceded to our demand to set up some local manufacturing. Low-end phones are now assembled in Chennai, Bengaluru and Noida, although the components are still imported.

Edit: First sentence is incorrect, as pointed out below.

Look at the bar chart below. Apple has almost a two-third marketshare in Japan, but only about 20% in China. But China has a variety of Android manufacturers, so that Apple is the single biggest vendor.

Sorry, but I couldn’t find 12 distinct colours that all lie on the blue - yellow spectrum.

In addition to what philpo said, they also provide good language support for many African languages, something no other vendor does.

1. There are Terminal emulators. They can’t do everything, but they’re okay.

2. They used to have freely unlockable bootloaders but it is becoming harder and harder with newer models.

1. Why? Android is Linux.

2. Xiaomi allows bootloader unlocking, so you can install a ROM that gives you root access.

Poco phones are based on Redmis. They do change some things, even hardware. So nothing is stopping them from changing their unlocking policy.

The Redmi brand is aimed at a mainstream audience, and there are probably enough people who will try to unlock bootloader without thinking through that Xiaomi wants to put some deterrance. Although I feel the Poco brand should allow easier unlockong, since it is aimed more at power users.

This is a program dedicated to influencers, not reviewers.

Corrected. Thanks!

There are YouTube channels/instagrammers that exclusively review sponsored products.

I don’t use instagram, and stick to the more reliable youtube channels. Didn’t know this was a thing.

If Google believes that the outlet is legit, they give the review device for free without the sponsorship contract. When they talk good about the device they need to flag the post with #giftfromgoogle and #teampixel

This feels like one of those stories where one person misleads another without technically lying.

Normies buy Redmi Note Pro Max + (or iPhone if they’re rich). Pixel is for devs and photos.