While many Chinese smartphone vendors have climbed up rapidly into the global Top 10 list, most of them employ heavily ‘personalized’ user interfaces on their Android devices to distinguish their smartphones and tablets from those of their rivals in a highly-competitive market. With such heavily skinned UIs, even reputable top-tier Chinese companies, such as Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Gionee, Oppo, Vivo, Coolpad and LeEco, are almost always among the very last to roll out updates to their respective devices. While the Chinese brands do generally offer a good bang for your buck, waiting for them to update their devices can be a long and frustrating process. This year, however, things have been a bit different, with Huawei and Lenovo already rolling out Android 7.0 to some of their premium handsets, with many more expected to follow in the New Year.
If reports coming out of China are anything to go by, Xiaomi will apparently be the next in line to roll out Android Nougat to a bunch of its smartphones in the coming weeks. The Chinese tech company is reportedly testing Android 7.0 on quite a few of its handsets, with the Xiaomi Mi 4c, Mi 4s and the Mi Note expected to receive the much-awaited update fairly soon. That’s according to the product manager for MIUI, which is the company’s proprietary Android-based ROM that has garnered both praise and criticism in equal measure over the years. The company is yet to announce when newer and arguably more premium devices like the Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus, Mi MIX or the Mi Note 2 will get to taste the latest flavor of Android, but it will probably happen once the company finishes rolling out Android Nougat to the older devices.
There’s also no word on when the wildly popular Redmi series will receive Android Nougat, which is something millions of Redmi 3 and Redmi Note 3 owners around the world must be wondering about. Either way, Android Nougat will come to Xiaomi devices in the form of MIUI 9, and the rollout will apparently start either during this month, or at the latest, by January 2017. The coming days will hopefully bring more info about Xiaomi’s impending Nougat rollout.