Xiaomi has decided to take on Samsung and Huawei directly on the app performance front with the reveal of its latest user interface, MIUI 9. The company did so in a newly released video that shows its current flagship device, the Mi 6, competing with Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and Huawei’s P10 in app launch speeds. More specifically, it is intended to show off how efficient and powerful the company’s hardware is when paired with MIUI 9. Perhaps unsurprisingly, bearing in mind that the footage was revealed as part of MIUI 9’s announcement, Xiaomi’s software convincingly beat the competition. Testing a total of 50 app launches, Xiaomi’s MIUI 9 was able to launch 43 popular Android applications substantially faster than the competition. Samsung’s latest version of TouchWiz, now called Samsung Experience, and Huawei’s EMUI 5.1 only managed to beat MIUI 9 in four and three apps, respectively.
The numbers are a drop in the bucket, since there are over 3 million apps available on the Google Play Store, and Xiaomi could easily have chosen applications where its own software had the advantage. However, Samsung and Huawei may want to take note all the same. The Chinese smartphone market has been somewhat volatile in the past and handset makers based in the country became increasingly popular over the years, partially at the expense of Samsung. Beyond that, the method used by Xiaomi to run the test could be among the most scientifically sound to date since the company used a fairly complex machine to simulate user taps and to make things as equal as possible wherever such factors could be controlled. The applications themselves were launched from a fresh start for each device. That means that they should have stood on equal footing at the beginning of the test.
Xiaomi, for its part, says that it optimized haptic feedback, made its CPU acceleration more intelligent, and optimized thread scheduling to achieve the “explosively fast” launch performance of its MIUI 9 ROM. On the hardware front, Xiaomi’s device only really has a single advantage – The Mi6 boasts 6GB of RAM, compared to Samsung and Huawei’s 4GB of RAM. Aside from that, the Mi6 packs a quad-core Snapdragon 835 SoC, coupled with the Adreno 540 GPU for graphics rendering, and is running Android 7.1.1 with MIUI 9 on top. Despite the veracity of this test, whether the latest reveal from Xiaomi is any indicator of real-world performance remains to be seen.