A Chinese billionaire thinks Apple is the worst thing that happened to the smartphone industry since forever and is not afraid to show it. In a shocking post shared on social media website Weibo, a Twitter of sorts for mainland China (where Twitter is blocked), Jia Yueting compared Apple to Hitler and pledged to change the industry with its new smartphone.
Yueting is the founder and CEO of Leshi TV, a video sharing website which is also preparing to release a new 5,5 inch screen smartphone, the X900. The poster he shared on his verified account shows a cartoon of Hitler - the Nazi Party leader who sent millions of people to their deaths - wearing a red armband that bears an Apple logo instead of the swastika cross.
On top of the poster, the explanation: "Crowsourced, Freedom vs. Arrogance, Tyranny." In the bottom, two arrows go opposite ways: to the left there are children, sunshine and wind mills, where Android is crowdsourced and free. To the right, there's Hitler, danger and 'do not cross' signs, because it's Apple's way.
The billionaire then rants in a text accompanying the poster. "Under the arrogant regime of iOS domination that developers around the world love to hate, we are always carefully asking, 'is this kind of innovation okay?," he writes. Yueting argues that Apple's "closed loop" curbs technological innovation, damages the progress of the smartphone industry and doesn't serve the users' best interest.
Something might have gone wrong with the response to the poster, because Yueting has since replaced Hitler with a mean looking king, whose sceptre bears the half eaten Apple that symbolises the iPhone maker.
That doesn't mean the CEO is not going after the company anymore, as he shared a second poster questioning Apple's strategy and showing a colourful bunch of people surrounded by black, robot-like (supposed) iPhone users.
He goes on to call Apple a "dusk empire."
LeTV upcoming entry in the smartphone market will encounter a very competitive arena in China, and the reason why they're going after Apple is that the company made a huge comeback late last year with the iPhone 6. Millions of Chinese customers rushed to get the two new models and propelled Apple back to worldwide number one smartphone vendor - signalling a shift in a market where Samsung lost to Xiaomi and them both lost to Apple.
