I joined the Xiaomi Mi Explorer program because of a pair of earbuds and stayed for a vacuum cleaner. That is not a joke. My oldest post in this whole pile is a write-up of the Xiaomi Pistons from 2014, and everything after it is the slow realization that Xiaomi was never really a phone company to me. It was an ecosystem that sold me fans, scales, scooters, and a worldview, one quirky gadget at a time. This is the chronicle of those years, roughly 2018 to 2022, when I covered the Xiaomi ecosystem in French almost daily and watched a scrappy value brand turn into the number two phone maker on Earth. However, I started with them when they were only a software company based at the local university because they posted job offers for Windows CE…

It started with a vacuum and a posture belt (2014 to 2018)

The 2018 stretch is pure ecosystem oddity, and I loved it. There was the Roidmi cordless vacuum, an electric mop for the floors, a posture-correcting belt called the A10, a MITU anti-stress fidget toy, and a partnership with the German tool maker Wiha that produced screwdriver sets I actually wanted. The serious one in the bunch was Xiaomi opening up the HAL3 and Camera2 API, the first sign the company cared about computational photography. The rest were branded wallets and WiFi smart plugs. I reviewed all of it with a straight face.

The year the firehose opened (2019)

2019 is the year my archive nearly drowned. The ecosystem went into overdrive: sport shoes, a bladeless Happy Life hand fan, another two-in-one VH Yu fan because one fan is never enough, a Yunmai portable push-up trainer I actually unboxed on camera, the Mijia walking treadmill, the Mi Body Composition Scale 2, a beard trimmer aimed at India, and a pair of sandals I will not defend. There was also the one Xiaomi object I flat-out hated, and I said so, because not everything in the ecosystem deserved the love.

Underneath the gadget noise, the real story was the phones and the engineering. The Mi Mix 3 5G showed up at China Unicom as one of the first 5G handsets anywhere, the Mi 9 hit Singapore, and Xiaomi teased a 108-megapixel sensor alongside the jump to 100W fast charging that nobody else could match yet. The software side got a proper MIUI 11 tease after a fake leak that was not actually a leak, and the developer in me appreciated Xiaomi releasing the Mi A3 kernel source and co-releasing the Helio G90T source with MediaTek.

It was also the year the suits noticed. Xiaomi cracked the Fortune Global 500 for the first time, landed on Forbes biggest-companies list and the Derwent Top 100 Global Innovators, hit five years and 100 million phones in India, and bet the whole company on an all-or-nothing strategy that Lei Jun spelled out himself. I spent a lot of 2019 wondering aloud whether Poco had a future inside Xiaomi. Turns out it did.

Going global, going premium (2020)

2020 is when Xiaomi stopped being the cheap option. The cameras got serious with promising early DxO returns on the Mi 10, the charging race kept escalating from a road to 200W wired to 80W wireless, and the company quietly shipped real infrastructure like the Vela IoT OS built on NuttX and the AX3600 WiFi 6 mesh. The TVs went MiniLED and OLED, and Xiaomi launched its first electric bike.

The pandemic shaped the year too. Xiaomi pushed a wave of products that made lockdown easier, moved repairs to at-home pickup, and had to respond when India started banning Chinese apps. It joined the 100 billion dollar club, declared it wanted to be number one in Europe ahead of Huawei, and renewed the Huami wearables partnership and the strategic MediaTek one. Then it got accused of spying by Forbes and replied with a live teardown, which was very Xiaomi.

Peak Xiaomi, and the pivot to cars (2021 to 2022)

2021 was the summit. Xiaomi became the number two phone maker worldwide, crossed 1000 physical stores, lit up global landmarks for the Mi 11, and shipped the strange and wonderful CyberDog robot built on Nvidia Jetson. The folding era arrived with the Mix Fold and the show-off Mix 4 with its under-display camera, charging hit actual over-the-air power, and even a Shop-in-Shop opened in Blagnac near Toulouse, which mattered to me as a French Xiaomi nerd more than it probably should have. My favorite headline of the whole run is still the time Xiaomi quietly saved Christmas in the USA.

But the move that reframed everything was calling electric vehicles Xiaomi next golden goose. The EV bet, the new Alive logo, and the accessibility-through-innovation gamble all pointed at a company that no longer wanted to be judged on phones at all. The last entry in this archive is fittingly absurd and on-brand: a Mi Electric Scooter Pro 2 in AMG trim. From earbuds to an AMG scooter in eight years. That is the whole story.

The rest of the archive, by year

There is far more in here than any narrative can carry without turning into a list, so here is the list. Everything below is part of the same run, kept for the record.

2019, the long tail

2020, the long tail

2021, the long tail

The 5G phone wave (2019 to 2021)

The phones deserve their own shelf, because once 5G arrived Xiaomi and Redmi flooded the zone. It opened with a launch date for the Mi Mix 3 5G in early 2019 and a Mi 9 Pro 5G routed through China Unicom, then 2020 turned into the year of the K30 Pro 5G, a phone I covered to an unreasonable degree: its price leak, the x100 zoom angle, a Fast and Furious special edition, and the Zoom Edition actually launching. Above it sat the Mi 10 family, from the Mi 10 and 10 Pro 5G arriving to the Mi 10 Pro connectivity breakdown and the cheaper Mi 10 Lite 5G, with my recurring gag that none of us could even use 5G in France running underneath the whole thing. It closed with the Mi 11 generation, the Mi 11 Lite 5G and the Mi 11 Ultra 5G, plus the Redmi 9T and Note 9T bringing 5G to the cheap seats.

A few corporate odds and ends round it out: the 2018 Q2 results, an Alphabet April Fool I am including only because it made me laugh, and the April Fool that turned out to be real. There is also the Phone Gate class action and the upside-down logo, both very of-their-moment.

The honest read, five years in: Xiaomi won me over with the boring brilliant stuff, the chargers and scales and fans that just worked and cost half what they should have, and it kept me by turning that ecosystem into a phone empire.