Allwinner

Allwinner was founded in Zhuhai in 2007 and broke through in 2011 with the A10, a system-on-chip that made Android tablets possible at pocket-money prices. Later parts such as the H3 and A64 ended up in the Orange Pi, the Pine64 and countless TV boxes. The price was unbeatable; the documentation was close to non-existent.

Linux support was largely built by volunteers in the linux-sunxi community, because the company tended to release kernel source late or not at all, in breach of the GPL. The vendor kernel it did ship got its own scandal in 2016: a leftover debug feature that gave you root if you wrote rootmydevice to a file under /proc.