Every Xiaomi phone I had started with a variation of the regular Android first start wizard. I suppose this is a kind of activation. These were supposed to be unmodified, original devices.

I say this because you can also buy modified devices, for instances Chinese devices that have been reflashed with an international ROM. If it booted without a wizard, you probably had one of these devices. Xiaomi always hated this, I'm not sure why, though a benign explanation is that sometimes these devices are said to come with malware pre-installed, and that's not a good look for Xiaomi (who like all Android manufacturers wants an exclusive right to install their own malware). This is one of the reasons unlocking the bootloader is rate limited and comes with a wait time.

to add to that: in order to unlock, you need to register with your phonenumber and the wait time is a random interval of a few days to a few weeks.

i think you can unlock one phone per month per registered phone number.

this is done expressly with the intent to prevent mass unlocking by 3rd party resellers.

there is another possible, more charitable explanation for the wait period for device unlocking: as a cooldown period to help people avoid being scammed into unlocking their phones

Was that a common scam before the cooldown?

I don't think so. OTOH what GP described (reseller earn money by batch unlocking phone and pre-installing not uninstall-able apps/malwares before selling to consumers) is very common some time ago.

China is wild.

"uninstall-able apps/malwares before selling to consumers"

Isn't this what American mobile operators do?

True about uninstallable for cheap phones at least eg. Boost mobile phone <= $150 from my experience. I've seen notification I can't swipe close, the voice mail app having built in ads...

At least they don't push snake-oil ads to your grandparents.

I bought a Samsung phone in Europe for someone in South America, and the phone wouldn't recognize their SIM card. It turned out that the phone will accept any SIM card but only if you turn it on first for ~5 minutes with an European SIM.

Yes, there is a sticker on the device box that says so. In my case it was 15 minutes of talk time with EU SIM card being required.

I had this many years ago with my Samsung Galaxy S4. I lived and worked in China back then and ordered the phone from Germany. It arrived, but it could not be activated. I tried every ROM I could find, but nothing helped. I ended up waiting a few months until I was back to Germany to activate the phone.

I stopped buying SAMSUNG after that experience.

I don't know about Android but my last couple of experiences with Chinese-designed gear have been along these lines.

First was a DJI drone (this was a few years ago so might be different now). In order to even boot it up you have to download and run their firmware installer on a desktop computer (requiring internet access and potentially gathering God-knows-what data) with the drone plugged in. Then to use the drone you have to install their app which demands access to all sorts of things only tangentially related to the main function of the drone.

Second was a wifi security camera. I'd expect a wifi camera setup to go "turn on, connect to camera's access point, configure via web interface, reboot camera". This one was "install app, grant app all permissions, create account on company web page, verify email address, use account to log in to app, point phone camera at QR code on security camera, app autoconfigures camera with your wifi password, all video+audio goes to their servers, you may access it via (and ONLY via) their phone app."

We did NOT keep that camera much less buy any more of them.

I think the process with the drone is at least partly due to aviation regulations, but with the camera it sure sounds like the Chinese have started copying the Western pattern of "cloud-ifying" products unnecessarily.

Then again, perhaps avoiding the bigger companies and going to the OEMs or other small manufacturers directly (who would specialise only in hardware, and essentially wouldn't have the resources to set up and maintain the server side, or even an app) might be a better choice.

I bought my Xiaomi to use Telegram and Google Authenticator. However I then realized I can't unlock my phone without having a phone number. The only reason I currently pay for a sim card is so I can unlock it when I find the time.

It does not feel like MY device at all.

My device required an agonizing 30-day wait time after unlock request. De-Googling worked, but it was a bumpier ride than my previous OnePlus and Samsung devices.

For carrier devices it's quite common - and not just Android. I have an iPhone at home which refuses to work until you connect it to the internet and plug in a SIM card. It has to check for carrier unlock since it was sold as a locked phone in UK originally and now needs activation before functioning on each reset.

I have an "older" (not really that old, an S10 5G) phone that I keep as a backup. It didn't need anything to start being usable after a full reset, not even a sim card; you just had to skip all the login prompts.

Yes, "common on carrier devices" doesn't mean "every device has it". It's more common on some carriers - e.g. I had a lot of fun times getting Verizon test devices to work in Europe because they wanted to activate on CDMA network (non-existent on the continent) as part of their setup process.

These locks have started to become less and less common these days though.

Ah, that's interesting - and that would have to be a very strong "good luck with that" case.

My S105G is a carrier device (Telstra), but as you say they're moving to not lock them down anymore which is a lot nicer experience.