How China Rips Off The iPhone And Reinvents Android

2018 will go down as the year when it became impossible to ignore the increasing advancements of Chinese smartphone hardware, from superlative camera arrays and super-speed charging to in-display fingerprint scanners and creative ways to stretch the display across as much of the front of the phone as possible. In a year that has seen Apple, Samsung, and now Google deliver iterative design updates to their flagship phones, devices like the Oppo Find X, Huawei P20 Pro, and Vivo Nex will be particularly memorable for their sheer gadgety appeal.

That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re always the best devices to actually use. Many experienced Android users in the West who try out Chinese phones, including reviewers here at The Verge, often find themselves unable to get over an immediate stumbling block: the software. For the unfamiliar, Chinese phone software can be garish, heavy-handed, and quite unlike anything installed on phones that are popular outside of Asia. If there’s anything that’s going to turn you off the brand-new Huawei Mate 20 Pro, for example — unsubstantiated Cold War-esque paranoia aside — it’s likely to be the software.