Well to be honest I'm sure exactly the same thing would have happened if you were to do this to the "FiiO-philes club". (I was the founder of both groups way back when and I'm not responsible for your removal, but if I were the sole admin at HiBy I'm sure I would be forced to do the same at some point) Being open to criticism is one thing, letting your own fanclub turn into an ad sign for a competing company's products is quite another.
It's unfair to compare the UI of a TIDAL client built from scratch on one of only two players in the world to ever manage to shoehorn a custom audio-centric touchscreen UI on that particular CPU, to one that simply shoehorns Android onto the weakest CPU that will fit and let that take care of everything. Especially on still frames
Joe, I respect you because you seem to have gotten the respect in these forums.
But as someone who has worked at a billion dollar consumer electronics manufacturer for 13 years and being responsible for a 200 million dollar product line for 7 of these years, I disagree. This is not the way to handle it. Especially not after begging me to take down my Amazon.com review and offering me a small gift and giving a promise to fix the issues within a reasonable time frame.
Fiio is at least declaring all chips they use in their products, like they did here for M6:
https://www.fiio.com/m6_parameters Hiby keeps these chips secret, I might open it and see what is inside to learn and publicly declaring them. Those witheld information includes what the lousy WiFi/BT chip used in R3 actually is as well.
I had a talk with a friend of mine who is a mathematics professor. A student got 30 over 100 in final exam. He came to my friend and said:" I thought my exam was pretty good " My friend replied, "The biggest problem is not that you got 30, you being thinking you had a pretty good exam is the real problem - you simply have no idea what you are studying in this class"
Nowadays I make my living from telling business owners what is delusional thinking and what is not.
Thinking that rewriting a streaming service like Tidal in the form of a UI from last decade is feasible, is delusional thinking. If it is not understood that this was delusional thinking after all these months, then the situation is severe. If it is not understood that the situation is severe, then it is more severe and more delusional.
For gods sake, forget missing all other Tidal functionality: how can you explain the lack of a simple sorting of tracks/albums/artists etc ? how can you explain that this damn thing finding different Tidal access links for some of the tracks/albums/artists than all other Tidal clients in the world - on some albums it is able to play the tracks I mark on other Tidal clients, on some it can't. It is unable to display the tracks it can't stream in grey color; for god's sake it is a simple check and color display.
After spending less than 2 days, I understand why R3 could not be released with Android: Android requires an internal storage, minimum 4 GB. Half of it is reserved to the system, half of it to cache streaming data. Just after a few hours of sampling Tidal tracks, I was shocked to see there was 1,3 GB of cached Tidal data stored on internal storage.
R3 relies on microSD card to store data, but to have an Android build that supports using microSD card as part of internal storage to install OS and apps working from it, it would require at least a microSD card with A1 class description; better with A2 class description - to store cached streaming data and run Android apps from the microSD card. And those cards are considerable more expensive than cards that are not A1 or A2.
When viewed in retrspect in a few years, people will acknowledge the pioneering effort given by Hiby to releasing a good sounding little DAP with streaming services for less than 200 USD price point - after acknowledging how miserably they failed and let others take the market with small Android DAP's with streaming services. I am sure before the end of 2019, there will be dozens of Chinese Android DAPs with streaming services in the market.