It’s part of the unique way that Xiaomi operates, closely analyzing the user feedback it gets on its smartphones and following the suggestions it likes for the next batch of 100,000 phones. It releases them every Tuesday at noon Beijing time. “Every batch is incrementally better,” said Hugo Barra, the ex-Google product executive who jumped over to Xiaomi in August in what looked like a role to help the company expand internationally. Barra was speaking on stage at the GMIC mobile conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, alongside Xiaomi’s billionaire founder Lei Jun. Just across the street at the Moscone Center North, Apple was releasing a new range of iPads, last updated in November 2012.
Barra, who had his own experience at Google to compare to, said Xiaomi’s obsessive and rapidly-executed focus on user feedback was “not something you see often in this landscape.” He revealed that product managers at the company can spend half their time perusing the company’s active user forums.

While this crowd-sourced approach to developing a product is the complete antithesis to Apple’s secretive, top-down approach, Xiaomi gets called the Apple of China on a regular basis.
“What we are trying to accomplish is very different to what Apple is trying to achieve,” said Jun, who spoke through a translator.