Swiping up on the home screen opens up a system-wide search interface. You can configure what shows up here, or you can disable this altogether. It contains different cards with relevant information - recent apps, step counter, notes, calendar events, the weather, and favorites, among others. It's quite similar to Today's page in iOS. There is a Quick Card pane, the leftmost one. The notification drawer comes from the top and has the usual quick toggles. The absence of an app drawer is still the preferred Xiaomi approach. The main UI comprises of pages to drop all your apps, widgets and potentially folders to organise it all. This is especially convenient if you own other Xiaomi tech. A swipe to the right does reveal a Mi Home, Mi Remote and flashlight interface. The lock screen only has a couple of shortcuts. On the surface, the UI is still very clean and clutter-free. There are tons of improvements under the hood, too, such as better RAM management, faster performance, lighter on resources, and improved Doze mode for standby power efficiency. Yes, there is a lot of "smart" with MIUI 9 and it's made possible thanks to the new machine learning process. MIUI 9 builds on v.8 with multi-window support, quick replies for notifications, smart app launcher, smart assistance, and smart image search.
Just like many other OS skins, Xiaomi has been abstracting it away from the Android core, as a flushed-out experience in itself, independent of its underlying OS.
Even if you end up with a device with a custom modification, Xiaomi is well inclined to let you unlock the bootloader and easily flash over whatever version or ROM branch you might desire.
The presence of Oreo out of the box, seems to be one big differentiating factor between the global Redmi Note 5 AI Dual Camera and its India Redmi Note Pro sibling, which is shipping with Nougat.īut, ROM versions are fleeting. This is a really current ROM, based on Android 8.1.0 and currently rocking the May security patch. On the flip side, there are more local and vendor varieties and software branches of the platform in the wild than we could possibly identify ourselves.īest we can tell, however, our review unit is on the official MIUI branch and is running the Global stable 9.5.13.0.OEIMIFA build. Xiaomi has never really been too strict about its modification and re-distribution policies, which has definitely fostered a vibrant community. MIUI is, by popular opinion, one of the better and definitely one of the most popular custom Android flavors out there.