Xiaomi is a huge smartphone presence in many countries, and it got there, at least in part, by copying Apple. We could dress things up and pretend that wasn’t the case, but we’ve all got eyes. Xiaomi recently unveiled another not so subtle Apple clone with its “Mimoji” AR emoji feature. The company was adamant it wasn’t just copying Apple’s Memoji… and then it literally stole Apple’s Memoji promo video.
The 3D avatars Xiaomi showed off during its announcement of the Mi CC9 were uncannily close to the Apple Memoji style. The faces have oversized eyes and tiny mouths like Memoji, and even the movements look similar. Then, one Weibo user noticed an unusual video (see above) on the product page for the Mi CC9—a copy of Apple’s Memoji promo video. You can see the original Apple video below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgy6LaO3SB0?feature=oembed&w=668&h=376]
The video, which purports to show Mimoji in action, graces CC9 product pages on JD.com and Suning. A Xiaomi rep says this was just a mixup caused by staff uploading the “wrong content.” In this case, “wrong” apparently means a different company’s content. I’d say Xiaomi is going to fire its marketing staff, but it’ll probably wait to see what Apple does first.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/07/05/xiaomi-apple-mimoji-memoji-copy/
