But no real competition for on-chip Wifi/BLE around.

Only ugly two-chip solutions or hyper exotic stuff with no community.

Not sure I'd call the silabs chips hyper exotic. The SIWG917 is intended as a direct competitor to ESP32s. It's a bit more expensive, but not unexpectedly so.

I'm not sure about WiFi, but JieLi (JL) definitely has a huge marketshare for single-chip BLE/BT. They are the origin of the infamous "the Bluetooth device is ready to pair" stock prompt voice.

oh there are a lots, it's just that they are not interested in Western market.

BES, Sifli, realtek, boufallo, etc.

> But no real competition for on-chip Wifi/BLE around.

No competition or no market?

I can't imagine Espressif is selling much volume of these chips.

The fact that they can't even fix their SPI module would tend to indicate that their engineering staff is very thin.

They've sold a billion of the things.

https://www.espressif.com/en/news/1_Billion_Chip_Sales

Whats wrong with its external flash and memory?