Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi is reigning over India's low-cost smartphone market in just a few short years since it entered the country in 2015.
Xiaomi's latest, the Redmi Note 8, only took 15 minutes to sell out in India on a "flash sale" on Monday.
Such support for the brand's products isn't unusual.
The process of registering online and watching out for flash sales isn't easy according to Mala Bhargava, a technology journalist.
Though Xiaomi's mobiles are also available offline, most of its new models are first sold online making up more than half of the company's sales.
Jayanth Kolla, the partner at telecom research firm Convergence Catalyst, pointed out the online community Xiaomi has as "astonishing."
The moment Xiaomi entered the Indian market in 2015, it focused on selling its products online keeping distribution costs low and making the phones cheaper.
This also helped the brand cultivate a cult-like following, a genius strategy in the fickle smartphone market.
Chinese companies now dominate more than half of India's 450 million smartphone users, approximately worth $8bn (£6bn).
Xiaomi often called "the poor man's iPhone", is leading the pack of Chinese smartphone brands in India with 28% of the market now from the 3% market share it had in 2016.
The monicker of being a poor man's iPhone started when the company put out iPhone lookalikes.
Though the company got initially criticized for doing this, it was Xiaomi's features and hardware that made Indians feel that they were getting their money's worth.
Its flagship affordable Redmi phones have a 64-megapixel camera that can be bought starting at 9,999 rupees ($141) and going up to 17,999 rupees ($254), one-third of the price of an iPhone.
Indian consumers often upgrade to an Apple or Samsung mobile the moment their income rises.
One of the reasons also of China's smartphone taking over India's home-grown mobiles is because of the lack of 4G capability when they entered the Indian market around 2016-2017.
When 4G arrived in India, Chinese companies had successfully outfitted their phones with 4G tech.
However, competition in the Indian market is tight and no company had dominated for a long time.
Xiaomi's market growth is showing a plateau at 28% with Samsung close behind at 25%.
Xiaomi's director in India, Manu Jain, said that "A few years ago, the premium market was about three to four percent of the Indian market. This has now grown."
This could be one of the reasons why Xiaomi tried selling premium smartphones in its new range of the K-20 series.
Still, Xiaomi's premium phone prices, from 20,000 to 30,000 rupees ($282 to $423), still isn't in the league of the iPhone or Galaxy smartphones.
