SAN FRANCISCO—Top Xiaomi executives announced plans to enter the American market this year, minus handsets—at least for now.

"We intend to launch mi.com in the US in a few months," Hugo Barra, a Xiaomi vice president, told reporters at a press event on Thursday.

Mi.com is the Chinese startup's answer to Amazon—a one-stop online shop currently only available in China where users can buy a vast assortment of consumer electronics under the Xiaomi brand. The company, previously known for making smartphones and tablets in China (and for frequently copying Apple's designs), clearly wants to build a dominating ecosystem to sell products and services.

"Market size matters the most," Bin Lin, the president and co-founder of Xiaomi added. "We are really not looking to make money on a per device basis, but users matter."

Later, he mentioned specifically that Xiaomi was interested in expanding to Russia, Brazil, the Middle East, other Asian countries, and more Latin American countries, but lamented the fact that the American market remains dominated by contract-driven carrier-subsidized handsets. Last year alone, Xiaomi, the world's number three handset manufacturer, sold over 61 million phones worldwide.

"We have never done a deal with a carrier," he said.

"In the US, unfortunately, the carriers have really tight control," Bin told reporters after the event. "I just don't know how customers would appreciate it if they were able to go into a carrier store and take away the phone for free. Is it changing? If that's changing, that's good news."

Xiaomi also announced that MIUI, its custom Android ROM, has over 100 million users. Besides shipping on Xiaomi's Android devices, MIUI is available for download for over a hundred Android devices, just like CyanogenMod. If you consider it a custom Android ROM, that number makes it the most popular by a landslide—CyanogenMod only has 12 million active users as of June 2014.

The Xiaomi handsets, though, currently dominating in China, have yet to even be announced for the US market.

"No timeline, it's not in our plan at this point," Barra, a former Google executive, said.

Mi, a name I call myself

The mi.com store already sells a number of Xiaomi products, including the famed handsets that boast features in China that most Americans would love, such as the ability to "beautify" a person in a selfie, which "adapts to subjects' age and gender." In China, apparently that means automatically widening women's eyes and homogenizing skin tone.

Barra also showed off other features that are unheard of in the United States, such as the ability to "record any phone call with one touch," or "to book a doctor's appointment in the UI," or buy movie tickets, train tickets, make an in-person appointment at the bank, or even order McDonald's for delivery.

"The next huge opportunity could be in the smart phone and smart device area," he said, introducing the Mi Smart Home. "It connects through the cloud with one interface, your phone."

Xiaomi hopes to "turn any home appliance into a smart device" by selling small modules that can be attached by the manufacturer—such as an air purifier (necessary in polluted Chinese cities). Barra and Bin didn't provide many more details about this plan, rushing through the end of their presentation.

Barra added that the mi.com store in the US will only sell "things like headphones, the Mi Band that I'm wearing right now, and other simpler products that have few, if any, certification requirements." Presumably the store would also include the battery pack, which has already won over some fans in the US, including a TechCrunch editor.

I have a 10,400 mAh Xiaomi battery pack. It charges my iPhone several times over. It's really well made. It costs 14 bucks. Extrapolate. — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) February 12, 2015

While they weren't mentioned as coming to the US, Xiaomi also manufactures smart TVs, Wi-Fi routers, set-top boxes, and an air purifier. On the back of its rapidly growing Chinese store (and much smaller international stores in India, Indonesia, and other countries), Xiaomi raised over $1.1 billion in venture capital late last year, putting valuation at over $46 billion.

But its rapid rise doesn't mean the company will soon sell shares at an initial public offering (IPO)—like another Chinese startup darling, Ali Baba, which went public in the US in 2014.

"No, we don't have plans for an IPO at any time shortly, not in the next three to five years," Bin noted.

Entering the US has always been a risky proposition for Xiaomi, as many of its unoriginally designed products could get tied up in lawsuits. The company has indicated it's starting to play the intellectual property game, though, and presumably products that blatantly infringe on others' designs would be kept out of the US.

"Last year we applied for 2,000 patents and are waiting for them to be granted, this year it will be double that number." Bin said.