MIUI’s boot screen was made of names. According to Xiaomi’s founder, Lei Jun, in a speech for the company’s tenth anniversary in 2020, they belonged to the first 100 people brave enough to install the system, and putting them there was the company’s way of saying thank you. They came to be known as the “100 sponsors of the dream.”
What they installed was barely a phone system at all.
Xiaomi was founded in April 2010, and on April 6, Lei Jun later recalled, about a dozen people shared a bowl of millet porridge to mark the start. The plan was to make a smartphone. None of them knew hardware, and they had no phone of their own to build on. So they started with software, running on other companies’ phones, built on open-source Android.
Even that was too big. A phone operating system, Lei Jun said, was a huge engineering job, far beyond a team of a dozen or so. So they picked the four functions that mattered most on a smartphone at the time: calling, texting, contacts and the home screen. Everything else could wait. In two months the first version was done.
Getting it onto a phone meant flashing it over the phone’s own software. Xiaomi set up a forum and asked for volunteers. A hundred people, Lei Jun said, were willing to take what he called a huge risk. On August 16, 2010, the first version of MIUI was officially released.
A hundred users is almost nothing. By Lei Jun’s account, Xiaomi did no promotion at all, and the number doubled every week: 200 in the second week, 400 in the third, 800 in the fourth. About a month after launch, on September 20, a user on XDA, a well-known international tech forum, posted an enthusiastic recommendation. In less than a year, MIUI had passed 300,000 users.
And every week there was a new version. Xiaomi’s 2018 Hong Kong listing prospectus says the company had updated the MIUI developer version every week since August 2010, building in direct feedback from its fans. Each week’s beta went out ahead of the stable releases so users could report problems and suggest changes. Its engineers, the prospectus says, regularly join the online forums to answer questions and learn what users need.
Exactly a year after that first release, on August 16, 2011, Xiaomi launched its first phone. Lei Jun said buyers reserved 300,000 of them in the first round. In his open letter in the prospectus, he describes the fans who “actively contribute feedback and feature ideas to our product development.”
The forum kept the receipts. By March 31, 2018, Xiaomi said, users had written about 250 million posts on it since it opened in August 2010. MIUI by then had about 190 million monthly active users.