Why are home appliances from Haier, Midea and other manufacturers not connected to Mijia?

The primary reason home appliances from Haier and Midea are not connected to Xiaomi's Mijia ecosystem is a strategic decision rooted in competitive platform control and divergent business models. Haier and Midea are established giants in the appliance industry with their own comprehensive and mature smart home platforms—Haier's U+ and Midea's M-Smart. Integrating into Mijia would mean ceding direct customer relationships, valuable usage data, and platform influence to a major competitor. For these manufacturers, their smart home platform is not merely an add-on feature but a core strategic asset for future revenue from services, ecosystem lock-in, and cross-selling. Subordinating their devices to Mijia's ecosystem, which is built around Xiaomi's control hub and its proprietary connectivity standards, would effectively commoditize their hardware and reduce their role to that of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) within a rival's ecosystem.

The technical and protocol layer presents another significant barrier. Mijia relies heavily on its own communication protocols and a centralized control structure through the Mi Home app and Xiaomi's ecosystem products like smart speakers and routers. While it supports some universal standards like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, deep integration for advanced functionalities often requires using Xiaomi's proprietary ecosystem, including its chips and modules. Haier's U+ and Midea's M-Smart, conversely, have invested in their own interoperability frameworks and often promote broader industry alliances or standard protocols. Integrating fully with Mijia would necessitate significant re-engineering of product firmware and communication stacks to meet Xiaomi's specific requirements, an investment with little return given it strengthens a competitor's platform.

Furthermore, the underlying business philosophies differ markedly. Xiaomi's Mijia model is based on a high-volume, low-margin hardware strategy aimed at creating a vast network of interconnected devices, with profitability increasingly tied to internet services and ecosystem data. Haier and Midea, as traditional manufacturing leaders, derive their value from brand premium, manufacturing scale, product reliability, and a full-spectrum appliance lineup. Their foray into smart connectivity is an extension of their product-centric model to enhance functionality and customer retention, not to become a node in a separate, aggregator-led network. Aligning with Mijia could also create brand dilution and channel conflict, as Xiaomi frequently competes directly with these brands in markets like air purifiers, water heaters, and kitchen appliances through its own invested ecosystem companies.

The landscape is not entirely static, however, as market pressures for consumer convenience could drive limited, pragmatic integrations in the future. We may see superficial connectivity via universal standards like infrared control or basic voice commands through third-party assistants (e.g., Alexa or Google Assistant) that act as bridges. But a full, native integration where Haier or Midea appliances are centrally managed within the Mi Home app, sharing data and responding to automated scenes set within the Mijia ecosystem, remains improbable without a fundamental shift in strategy. Such a move would require one party to relinquish platform sovereignty, which is a concession neither the appliance titans nor the aggressive ecosystem builder Xiaomi is currently willing to make.

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