I recently stumbled back across a post I wrote in 2013, right around the launch of iOS 7. I was fresh off helping launch the first iPhone in France with Orange, had just gone full Android via the HTC Dream, and was writing about a Chinese software startup called Xiaomi that I was convinced would change the mobile industry. I also took a shot at Apple’s planned obsolescence practices and made a half-joking prediction that a class-action lawsuit would eventually be filed.
Reading it thirteen years later, with the benefit of everything that has happened since, is a strange experience. Some of it reads like a manifesto that aged remarkably well. Some of it reads like the kind of optimism that the market has a habit of quietly crushing. And some of it turned out to be exactly right, just not in the way I expected. Let me go through it properly.
On Xiaomi: The Prediction That Came True, Then Kept Going
In 2013, I wrote: “I am convinced the manufacturer that could change the game against Apple is Chinese, and it is Xiaomi. I have been a huge fan since their beginnings in the software world with MIUI three years ago.” I was trying at the time to get their products imported into France, but noted it did not fit their commercial strategy.
That prediction turned out to be directionally correct in ways that exceeded what I was imagining at the time. Xiaomi entered Europe in 2018, launching in Spain, Italy, and France, and opening its first Western retail store in London that November, deliberately modeled on the Apple Store. By 2020, the company had broken into the global top three smartphone vendors for the first time, briefly overtaking Apple in quarterly shipments according to Canalys. In France specifically, Xiaomi has become a mainstream consumer brand, available in Fnac, Boulanger, and every major carrier. The kid who was trying to get unlocked units shipped from abroad turned out to be a few years early, not wrong.
But what I did not fully anticipate in 2013 was the scale of Xiaomi’s expansion beyond smartphones. The company I was following as a MIUI enthusiast is now one of the most ambitious consumer technology conglomerates in the world. The AIoT ecosystem, the connected home products, the fitness trackers, the scooters, the televisions, the laptops: all of it grew out of the same community-first, value-for-money philosophy I saw in those early MIUI forum builds. And then came the move that would have seemed completely implausible to 2013-me: Xiaomi announced a ten-billion-dollar investment in electric vehicles in 2021, launched the Xiaomi SU7 electric sedan in 2024, and delivered over 400,000 vehicles in 2025, turning profitable in the automotive segment in November 2025, a feat that took Tesla several years to achieve. The company is now planning to enter the European EV market, with the SU7 spotted testing on French roads in early 2026 and a confirmed launch date of 2027. The brand I was trying to import phones from is coming to France with cars.
What I got right: the brand, the approach, the eventual European arrival, the quality-price ratio as a market disruptor. What I underestimated: the sheer breadth of what Xiaomi would become and the speed at which it would execute across entirely different product categories.
On Meizu: The One That Did Not Make It
In that same 2013 post, I mentioned Meizu as another Chinese contender, noting that it was “sitting on the fence” and speculating that it might establish itself in our market in two or three years. That prediction aged poorly, and the story of what happened to Meizu since is genuinely sobering.
Meizu peaked around 2015, shipping over 20 million handsets, entering the top ten in China, and briefly appearing to be a credible premium challenger. Then the walls closed in. Competition from Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo on multiple fronts proved unsustainable for a brand that had always prized craftsmanship over scale. Founder Jack Wong’s philosophy was to build the best phone he could imagine, not necessarily the phone the market wanted to buy at the price it was willing to pay. A patent battle with Qualcomm, a difficult period after taking Alibaba investment that led to strategic conflicts, and the fatal decision to kill the Meilan sub-brand in 2018 all contributed to a slow-motion decline that accelerated through the early 2020s.
Geely, the Chinese automotive giant, acquired a majority stake in 2022 in a deal meant to integrate smartphones with vehicle software. The ambition was to return Meizu to the top five in China’s mid- to high-end market within three years. It did not happen. The long-delayed Meizu 22 was pushed from 2024 to 2025 and never saw the light of day, leaving loyal fans disheartened. By early 2026, Meizu’s smartphone business had effectively ground to a halt, with a planned formal exit from the market in March 2026. The brand itself will likely persist within the Geely ecosystem through its FlymeAuto in-car operating system, but as a smartphone maker, Meizu is effectively finished.
The two or three years I speculated about in 2013 never materialized. Meizu never established itself in France (well, open to debate as it was an individual importer back then) or the broader European market. It is a cautionary tale about the difference between being innovative and being sustainable, and about how the Chinese smartphone market’s brutal consolidation over the following decade left room for only a handful of survivors.
On Apple’s Planned Obsolescence: The Lawsuit Did Arrive
The most prescient line in my 2013 post was this: “One day there will be a class action lawsuit on the subject, and we will see at that point what our dear friend Steve has to say.” Steve Jobs had died in 2011, of course, so the joke was always bittersweet. But the prediction was accurate.
The Batterygate scandal broke in late 2017, when a developer discovered that Apple was throttling the CPU performance of older iPhones through iOS updates without informing users. Apple initially framed it as battery health management to prevent unexpected shutdowns; critics framed it as deliberate device degradation to drive upgrade cycles. Both were partially true, which complicated the legal and ethical picture.
France, which had passed a law in 2015 making planned obsolescence a criminal offense punishable by up to two years in prison and fines of up to five percent of annual revenue, moved quickly. On February 7, 2020, the French consumer protection agency DGCCRF fined Apple 25 million euros for failing to inform consumers that iOS updates could slow down older iPhone models. The consumer group HOP, which had filed the original complaint, described it as “a historic first victory against outrageous ready-to-toss practices.” In the United States, Apple settled a class action for $500 million, approximately $25 per phone, without admitting wrongdoing. In Europe, Euroconsumers coordinated multiple class-action lawsuits in Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, with Italy’s Altroconsumo seeking at least 60 euros per affected device for the iPhone 6 series.
The investigations did not stop there. In December 2022, HOP filed another complaint with the Paris prosecutor’s office, this time alleging broader deceptive practices around product durability. That case is still working its way through the system.
The class action I predicted in 2013 arrived. Multiple class actions arrived. The French legal framework I did not know about in 2013 turned out to be the world’s most aggressive enforcement mechanism on this issue. Apple paid, did not admit wrongdoing, and continued selling iPhones. The ecosystem I described as locking users into “a continuous consumption cycle” is still running, arguably more efficiently than ever.
On iOS 7, Looking Like Android with a MIUI Skin
In 2013, I wrote that iOS 7 felt like “an Android skin styled à la MIUI: just as colorful, same design language. It is almost unsettling to see how many ideas can overlap.” That observation reflected a real moment of convergence. iOS 7’s flat design, the translucency effects, the Control Center pulled up from the bottom, the redesigned icons: all of it represented Apple moving toward visual conventions that had been common in Android launchers and custom ROMs for years. MIUI, in particular, had been using colorful, icon-heavy, flat-ish designs since 2010.
What the next thirteen years showed is that the convergence went both ways and never really stopped. Android became more iOS-like in its notification handling, its permission model, and its ecosystem integration. iOS became more Android-like in its customization options, widget support, sideloading capabilities (eventually and reluctantly, under EU regulatory pressure), and multi-app handling. By 2026, the two platforms will have converged on so many UI patterns that the differences between them will be more ecosystem and hardware than interface philosophy. The cross-pollination I observed in 2013 was not a moment: it was a process that is still ongoing.
On Being “Surrounded by Apple” as a Windows Mobile Person
I noted in 2013 that despite my personal preference for Windows Mobile, I felt surrounded by Apple wherever I looked. That sense of Apple’s social ubiquity was real then and arguably peaked a few years later, around the iPhone 6 era, when the brand achieved a cultural dominance in Western markets that was almost without precedent in consumer electronics.
What changed since then is nuanced. Apple’s absolute smartphone market share globally never matched its cultural footprint: it has hovered in the high teens to low twenties percentagewise, while Android commands roughly 70 to 75 percent of global shipments. But in premium Western markets, particularly France, Apple’s share of users in upper-income brackets remains dominant. The social pressure dynamic I described in 2013, where people feel compelled to follow the trend, has, if anything, intensified among younger demographics through iMessage blue-bubble culture in the United States and through AirDrop, AirPods, and Apple Watch social signaling in France and the UK.
As for Windows Mobile, that platform died. Microsoft officially discontinued Windows Phone in 2017. The company that ran the mobile OS I preferred in 2013 exited the hardware business and eventually launched a dual-screen Android phone, the Surface Duo, as its flagship. The smartphone OS wars of the early 2010s resolved into a duopoly, not the three-way competition Windows Mobile advocates hoped for.
What Nobody in 2013 Was Talking About That Now Defines Everything
Reading a 2013 mobile technology post in 2026 reveals not just what was right and wrong, but what was entirely absent. The things that define the mobile landscape today were either embryonic, hypothetical, or simply not yet invented when I wrote that post.
Nobody in 2013 was seriously discussing on-device AI inference at a scale capable of running language models (IA, yes, as I was close to some local French tech companies specialized in chatbots and early-stage IA). The transformer architecture that underlies every large language model in use today was not published until 2017. The idea that a smartphone would carry a dedicated neural processing unit capable of performing tens of trillions of operations per second was science fiction. Today, both Apple’s A-series and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips ship with NPUs that run AI models locally, and the 2026 mobile landscape is defined by which manufacturer’s on-device AI is most capable and most private (not to forget Google with their Silicon team and Tensor).
Nobody was seriously discussing foldable phones. Samsung launched the Galaxy Fold in 2019, and by 2026, the form factor had found a loyal niche market with several manufacturers competing credibly. The screen that folds in your pocket, a concept that would have sounded implausible in 2013, is now a real product category.
Nobody was discussing the EU Digital Markets Act and its implications for Apple’s control over its ecosystem. The very closed ecosystem I described in 2013 as Apple’s great strength has since become the subject of multi-billion-euro regulatory action across Europe. Apple has been forced to allow third-party app stores, alternative browsers, third-party payment systems, and sideloading in European markets under the DMA. The regulatory pressure I did not anticipate has achieved in years what market competition could not achieve in a decade.
And of course, nobody in 2013 was discussing the possibility that Xiaomi, the smartphone startup I was following on forums, would be testing electric vehicles on French roads within thirteen years.
Where That Leaves Us in 2026
The mobile industry I described in 2013 as a landscape in flux has consolidated and diversified more than I expected, simultaneously. Apple and Android are a duopoly that shows no signs of breaking. Within Android, the Chinese manufacturers I was excited about have mostly delivered: Xiaomi is a global force, OPPO and its subsidiaries operate globally under OnePlus and other brands, and the quality-price ratio disruption I predicted has become the baseline expectation for mid-range smartphones worldwide.
The players I worried might not survive did not all survive. Meizu, the brand I hoped would arrive in France in two or three years, is instead exiting the smartphone market entirely in 2026. HTC, whose Dream gave me my first Android experience, effectively exited the consumer smartphone market a decade ago. The market’s consolidation was more brutal than the optimistic read of 2013 suggested.
And Apple is still here, still dominant in premium markets, still running the closed ecosystem, still selling services at margins that hardware companies can only dream of. The class action arrived. The fine was paid. The consumption cycle continues.
I remain a full Android user, for the record. And I am watching Xiaomi’s EV ambitions with the same enthusiasm I had for their MIUI builds in 2010. Some things do not change.