Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive, has criticised companies that copy Apple’s design calling it “theft” and “lazy” and certainly not “flattery”.

Ive discussed life with Steve Jobs, his design team, the iPhone 6, and why it took so long to create a larger-screened smartphone, in a rare interview with Vanity Fair at the New Establishment Summit in San Francisco on Thursday.

“I’ll stand a little bit harsh, I don’t see it as flattery,” said Ive when asked about Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, described as ‘the Apple of China’ by many. “When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is OK at all.”

Xiaomi, Samsung and other smartphone manufacturers have been accused of copying Apple’s designs, with long-running patent lawsuits between Apple and Samsung as well as others taking arguments to court.

Samsung and Apple agreed to drop lawsuits outside of the US in August after cases spanned multiple countries including Germany, Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan and Australia.

This marks the first time Ive has personally struck out against alleged copiers of his work, which has seen Apple reinvented first with the original iMac and then with the iPhone and iPad line as a design-focused company.

‘Many years ago we made prototypes’

Ive also said that Apple had been working on larger-screened smartphones for years, having created product models and decided that larger screens were more intuitive and useful.

“Many years ago we made prototypes of phones with bigger screens. They were interesting features, having a bigger screen, but the end result was a lousy product, because they were big and clunky,” Ive noted when asked why it took Apple so long to follow the trend first set by Android smartphones with screens larger than 4in around the 4.7in to 5in mark.

The designer explained that it was only as technology advanced and designs could be iterated that Apple reached a point where it was happy with the size and feel of the device, insisting that “it’s very important to make the edges comfortable, to feel less wide than it really is.”

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