Xiaomi’s MIUI 10 Android overlay was well received, and it seems like the company has started developing the next version of its Android skin, MIUI 11. The company actually held a meeting, the Xiaomi MIUI Core Experience Annual Meeting, in China, where the company’s Head of Product planning department, Liu Ming, gave a speech regarding MIUI 11, and thus officially kicked off the development of the new version of Xiaomi’s Android skin. During this meeting, Mr. Ming said that MIUI 11 will be “a new and unique OS”, which sound like Xiaomi will make some major changes compared to MIUI 10, but that’s probably not true. MIUI 10 was a major change in terms of the design compared to MIUI 9, so chances are that most of the changes in MIUI 11 will be in the backend, while we’re probably going to see some new features as well, but the design probably won’t change all that much.
Now, some photos from the presentation were available, but not many of them, and quite frankly, we did not get much info out of that. According to what we do know, is that MIUI 11 will be even faster than its predecessor, as expected, and it will offer an “even smarter interface than MIUI 10”. On top of that, more features will be included that “stimulate human interaction”, and those features will enable “easier use of the device”, which essentially means that MIUI 11 should be even more intuitive and easier to use in general. Detailed information was not discussed during the meeting at all, as it seems like Xiaomi either doesn’t have all the info just yet, or did not want to go into detail with its employees just yet, as is usually the case. Xiaomi did share some interesting stats during the meeting, though, it said that MIUI is being used by over 300 million users across over 40 different devices.
MIUI 10
MIUI 10 brought a lot of changes to the platform, it brought quite a few changes under the surface, but the most notable changes came in form of the design. MIUI 10 completely revamped the notification shade, quick toggles, various menus… it brought new navigation gestures, battery improvements, and lots more. The lockscreen and the homescreen remained quite similar to the ones in MIUI 9, though. The overview menu aka recent apps tray got revamped as well. In MIUI 9, the overview menu resembled the current one in Android 9 Pie, a horizontal list of apps, which was not very productive. Well, in MIUI 10, you’re getting a vertically light of apps in two columns, so app switching is much faster, and you’re getting to look at four cards at the same time, compared to one and two halves in MIUI 9. Smartphone screens are getting taller and taller, we really do not need horizontal anything, we need vertical solutions that will take advantage of that screen space. MIUI 10 also brought different brightness and volume bar adjustments, new weather and clock apps, and so on. All in all, it was a considerable change compared to MIUI 9, and even MIUI 7 and 8, which were quite similar to MIUI 9 in many ways, which is yet another reason we think the MIUI 11 will not be so different in terms of the design compared to MIUI 10.