Screenshot of Apple's Weibo account 

Apr. 29 (NBD) -- Apple has launched its Weibo account to offer technical support and tips to Chinese customers, but has been receiving complaints concerning iPhone quality and after-sales issues instead.

The iPhone maker set up the account "Apple Support" on China's Twitter-like social platform Weibo on April 23 and has garnered more than 166,000 followers as of press time.

The account was created to narrow the distance with customers, but unexpectedly customers flooded the space, reporting problems including blank screen on iPhone XR models, iPhone keyboard lag, crashing of iPhone X and poor signal.

Sun Yanbiao, head of the Mobile No.1 Research Institute, held that by launching the Weibo account, Apple follows the trend to build up a communication channel with its customers. But because of the smartphone maker's inflexible after-sales services and evasive and arrogant way to deal with customer complaints, the channel, once opened, became a vent for collective discontent, Sun said to news outlet Securities Daily.

The incident reflects Apple's big customer base in China but also unmasks rising problems of iPhones due to long lifecycle of the smart handsets, Sun added.

Big data solution provider All View Cloud's chief analyst Zhang Jinyang told Securities Daily that frequent problems of the iPhone XR and iPhone XS models equipped with new basebands from Intel prove iPhone's declining quality, and to some extent, indicate Apple's weakening control over its supply chain.

It's noticed that Apple also faced a spate of class action lawsuits in the U.S. allegedly for false alerts and lying about size and resolution of iPhones.

Zhang saw those lawsuits partly as reflection of "hardware anxiety" Apple has suffered from. The company aims to win the first place in both hardware sales and profits but to realize such goal entails princely capital input and brilliant creative ideas in addition to hardware, Zhang analyzed.

Email； gaohan@nbd.com.cn