Lo Xiaomi app store, the most popular store in China, seems to have become the most fertile ground for lovers of pirated apps, a place where they intertwine and cross legality and violation of copywright.
Many of the paid apps on other stores are free and widely available on the Xiaomi store, some of which come from an internal store known as "User Shared", Which allows users to share paid apps without restriction.
Other apps do not appear under the tag User Shared, but they are still free when other stores are obviously paid. We then reached the guys of Vector Unit, popular developers Riptide GP2, who confirmed that they did not have an agreement with Xiaomi to make their game download free of charge. But they have an agreement with a third company, which could be the cause of the problem.
Apps, even those User Shared, have no problems with connecting to Google Play services, online gaming, and so on. Some games like Battlefield 2, have shown difficulty in downloading extra content but tend to run smoothly.
Here are some of them downloadable games on the Xiaomi app store for free:
- Riptide GP2
- Dead Space
- Prince of Persia Shadow and Flame
- Biohazard 4 (Resident Evil 4)
- Biofrenzy
- Shadowgun
- NBA 2k14 (Amazon)
- King of Fighters' 97
- Samurai II: Vengeance
- Battlefield 2
Incidentally we were able to download Flappy Birds although the author removed it from the Google Play Store and the Apple Store. We contacted the developers of these apps to ask if the decision was theirs. It seems unlikely that they are the ones who have decided to make these apps free, in particular Dead Spaceche on the Play Store is sold for 5,99 €.
To be clear, this is not the first time that Xiaomi comes up in copywright violations: in the past the Youku video streaming service (Chinese YouTube) had sued the Beijing-based company for illegal video delivery on its own set top box. Without forgetting the incredible resemblance of Xiaomi MI Key with Pressy born on KickStarter...
We have also contacted Xiaomi for more information on the User Shared, but we have not received any reply yet.
Until even the developers will not provide an explanation / answer, everything you read is fictitious. One thing is certain, however, the apps that we normally find paid, on the Xiaomi app store are free to download. And strange thing, their creators do not seem to know ...
[With]
