This is one of the reasons why I will probably never again do a hardware start-up.

Lemme give you a counter example. Chinese copied Neato or irobot Roomba, their hardware was even superior and price is 30% as much, but ultimately failed as a product. Because the route planing algorithm is completely shit. You often found it stuck or running out of power.

Neato or iRobot does not sell in China, Chinese users actually pays extra to get one. And they are happily doing so.

The moral of the story? Chinese can not copy the soul of your product.

Kindof surprising that they did not manage to obtain the routing algorithm of the Roomba.

Or at least add a barrier, like a cloud-provided service component.

Not sure how much that would help even.

Look at the Misfit Shine (http://store.misfit.com/), great product, beautiful device. Then a few weeks ago I get this in the email from DX: http://www.dx.com/p/otium-shine-1-1-ipx7-bluetooth-v4-0-smar...

It is obviously the same product, they are even using the same marketing photos.

Now here is the twist, they sort of did their own hacked version of the Shine App, and even released it to the AppStore.