Since mobiles have to be sold freely by operators, there is no longer any difference between buying a mobile on Amazon or in an operator’s online store as far as the mobile we receive is concerned. However, now they have discovered a new trick to offer a different experience if you are an Orange customer.
Xiaomi and Orange have signed an agreement in Spain, France and Poland . From now on, if you buy a new Xiaomi mobile and put an Orange SIM card in it, you will automatically have three operator applications installed. The trick is that the applications are hidden and disabled as standard. However, when you insert an Orange SIM, all three applications become active.
Apps that are activated by inserting the Orange SIM
The three applications that are included are My Orange (to manage our account with the operator), Orange TV (access to the company’s multimedia content) and My Livebox (total control of the router configuration). These apps are disabled in MIUI, but as soon as the mobile detects that the SIM inserted is from Orange , it will activate them.
This will happen both in Xiaomi mobiles that are purchased through Orange , as well as those that are purchased in any other store. The first of the mobiles to include this curious functionality is the Xiaomi Mi 11i. This will make the image of Xiaomi mobile phones now occupy at least tens of megabytes more.
They will come pre-installed on mobile phones, but hidden
Including the applications by default has better alternatives, since as soon as they are activated, they will be immediately updated by the mobile in the Play Store. Instead, there should be some kind of function integrated into the mobile or an app that downloads the applications from the Google Play Store to, in addition to having the most up-to-date version, to avoid using outdated versions that do not include the latest functionalities that offers the operator.
Thus, in the event that we buy a mobile through Orange, it will already come with the pre-installed applications of the operator. This is something that operators do frequently, adapting the firmware of each mobile to their services to always offer the best functionality. When an operator validates an update from a manufacturer, it does so by ensuring that features like VoLTE and the like work properly, thus avoiding potential compatibility issues in the future.
