[qwertyuiop1234]

I think author explained the copycat claim rather clearly:

"It's a common reflex in the USA to call Xiaomi and similar companies copycats, on both a hardware and software level, and there's certainly a lot of design inspiration going on, but dismissing these phones as rip-offs is rather lazy. When you actually hold them and use them you would never mistake them for iPhones, any more than you'd mistake a $500 coat or bag for the $2,000 example that sometimes inspires the colour or trim. You can sometimes see where it came from, but it's not the same, nor is it trying to be. Rather, they deliver a similar approach to the user experience at a lower price in a way that's often been absent from Android so far (it's hard not to look at some of Nokia's beautiful Lumia devices and wonder what impact they might have had on Apple if they'd run Android)."