Arun Maini, who publishes as Mrwhosetheboss, spent about forty-one minutes on a phone brand most people outside India will never hold. The video is I Investigated India's Biggest Smartphone Controversy, and the subject is Ai+, launched in July 2025 by NxtQuantum Shift Technologies India Private Limited. Its chief executive, Madhav Sheth, ran Realme's India business until he left that company in 2023.
You almost certainly do not own one of these phones, and none of this is a reason to want one. It is here because the method travels. What Maini did to Ai+ is the thing nobody does to the handset already in your pocket: open the app list, read who wrote each preinstalled app, and see whether the marketing survives the contact.
The claim under test was provenance, not performance
Ai+ sells itself as India's first fully sovereign smartphone — designed, built and governed in India, running its own NxtQuantum OS, with user data held on Indian cloud infrastructure. That is a claim about where a phone and its data come from. No benchmark touches it. A camera score can neither confirm nor deny it. The only way to check a provenance claim is to look at what is installed and at what the internals say they are, which is what the investigation set out to do.
What the video reports
These are his findings, and those of the Indian creators who went first. There is no test bench here, so nothing below was confirmed independently by this site:
- Preinstalled system apps traced to Sprocomm, a China-based original design manufacturer — among them a phone-transfer tool and a storage cleaner, some of them awkward or impossible to remove.
- The Nova Flip appearing to be a rebadge of ZTE's nubia Flip 2, with ZTE identifiers sitting inside system components rather than anywhere in the marketing.
- Software that reads as a familiar Android skin rather than a ground-up Indian one.
Indian outlets covering the dispute describe the same list, and it lines up with what the channels TechWiser and TechBar published in April 2026.
A rebadged ODM phone is not, by itself, the scandal
Worth saying plainly, because the coverage tends to skip it: buying a finished design from an ODM is ordinary. A large share of the industry does it, including brands you respect, and a rebadged phone is not a broken phone. Ai+ has answered publicly too — Sheth has said the company wants unbiased feedback rather than validation, and the brand later offered reviewers a week with two unreleased models before they went on sale, with no embargo attached.
The gap is between an ordinary supply chain and a story built on sovereignty. That gap is the finding. It is the same distance between an engineering test and a marketing claim, and it opens the same way every time: one department writes the promise and another writes the package list.
The checks he ran work on the phone you already have
None of this needs equipment. On Android: Settings, then Apps, then show system apps, then read the developer name on everything you did not install yourself. Note which ones the uninstall button refuses. Open the privacy policy of a preinstalled utility rather than the brand's own, because they are frequently not the same document and only one of them is written to be read.
You will usually find something. A cleaner holding broad storage permissions. A transfer tool from a company whose name is not on the box. A cloud account whose jurisdiction lives in a policy page instead of the spec sheet. That is not proof of anything sinister and is not meant to be. It is the difference between knowing what is on your phone and assuming.
The court order is the part that reaches everyone
In April 2026 the Delhi High Court granted NxtQuantum and Sheth an ex parte interim injunction against TechWiser and TechBar, plus unnamed John Doe defendants, after finding on a first look that the videos lacked real technical examination. Indian legal trade press reported the order, and the same outlets reported a second turn weeks later: the court called Sheth in personally, after TechWiser argued the injunction had been obtained by withholding material facts and serving notice to a wrong address. The case was still moving when this was written, and this piece cannot confirm where it stands today.
The John Doe wording is what deserves your attention, because it reaches people who were never named. If a critical video has to survive a court's view of its methodology, the reviews that reach you before you buy are filtered before you ever see them. That is a different problem from the ordinary limits of a YouTube test, and a harder one to notice, because what is missing does not announce itself.
What this changes for you
Nothing on your desk changed. What should change is the size of the gap you assume between a brand's story about itself and what its own app drawer says out loud. Assume it is wider than the marketing, narrower than the outrage, and checkable in about two minutes.
The habit generalises. A creator taking a claim apart does something no spec sheet can, and it is worth knowing what those teardowns actually establish: what a durability test proves asks the same question of scratches and bends instead of app lists. For the sunnier end of the same channel's work, what the thinnest tech of 2026 gives up is what happens when that curiosity goes shopping instead of digging.
Last updated September 22, 2026