It is very hard to establish a mobile ecosystem of developers and handset-makers in a market where other firms—not just Xiaomi, but Baidu, Tencent (which operates WeChat) and others—are entrenched.

However, it has set its sights on becoming an Internet company, seeing its buyers as "users" and its phones as a gateway to "an ecosystem" of content, according to its executives.

It's worth pointing out that the MIUI build for the Xiaomi phone has a rather unique feature that no other phone currently support: a dual partition system.