ZTE’s US arm launched Project CSX, working toward a crowdsourced mobile device it will launch in 2017.

The company’s member forum, Z-Community, will serve as “the platform for ideation and feedback through the entire development process”. The project will be broken into two stages where users can submit and vote for their favourite ideas.

Lixin Cheng, chairman and CEO of ZTE USA, said: “This is the first time a phone manufacturer is stepping out and crowdsourcing something entirely new, from start to finish. It’s a bold approach for the industry that demonstrates how ZTE keeps consumers at the heart of everything we imagine, design and deliver.”

Submissions are held to three rules: it must be a mobile product, the technology must be realistically possible by 2017, and the final product “must be affordable for the general population”.

ZTE has talked about Project CSX before, noting it has already used customer input in device development elsewhere.