MIUI 12.5 fluency & stability this year's top priority; Control Center & Super Wallpaper lags to be fixed soon, as per R&D head

Last year has easily been one of the busiest ever for MIUI, so much so that two major versions got worked upon simultaneously. The result of this is the radically altered Android skin MIUI 12.5 has turned out to be.

However, while the MIUI development team has indeed been extremely busy with feature additions, little focus has been given to optimizing existing stuff and improving stability.

The result of this is an extremely laggy software experience, even on higher-end models, combined with long-existing bugs screaming for attention. We highlighted in the past how a community mod recommended staying on Android 10 until Android 11 got a bit more stable.

Consequently, the Mi Community forums have been plagued by hundreds of complaints from almost every device regarding a plethora of issues. Users have been demanding reasons and it is about time Xiaomi gave out an explanation.

Xiaomi recently made a Weibo post for a recent session wherein MIUI’s R&D head themselves answered some of the frequently asked questions. This was coupled with a lengthy apology for MIUI’s shortcomings.

An excerpt from the same (translated from Chinese) has been given below:

First of all, in the past year, we did not do enough in terms of stability, which caused some usage problems for you who are extremely concerned about us. It is lower than everyone’s expectations. I am very sorry.

Additionally, much of the issues plaguing MIUI 12.5/12 today were blamed on Android 11. Android 11 does indeed bring about a plethora of changes including a new restriction known as Scoped Storage to prevent apps from having unauthorized access to the device file system.

This change was claimed to require massive rewrites in the ‘system mechanism’ which had been rushed due to the pandemic resulting in an extremely unstable overall system.

Thankfully, the R&D head claimed that fluency and stability are this year’s top priority. Xiaomi did promise smoother software and better optimized power consumption in their MIUI 12.5 website and it seems that they’re finally set to fulfill it.

Plenty of users were concerned about power consumption and lags when using Super Wallpapers to which the MIUI R&D head had the following to say:

Super wallpaper is generated by 3D real-time rendering, which will inevitably take up more computing resources than static wallpaper. Super wallpapers will be hierarchically re-designed in the follow-up to improve performance.

When inquired about lags when opening and closing applications the following response was given out:

We currently have a special project for full-screen gestures, which will focus on issues related to full-screen gestures.

Additionally, the issue wherein the unlock animation would lag or not be triggered was also acknowledged. It will be fixed through a MIUI Launcher update so a system update won’t be required:

We are continuing to follow up on the problem of no animation when unlocking on the desktop. We have repaired most of the scenes. At present, we have found two scenes (the folder or the screen disappeared under the recent task), which will be fixed soon. After the repair, we will update the desktop through the application store to solve this problem, no OTA system is required.

But perhaps the greatest revelation was about a Control Center redesign set to enter the MIUI beta branch soon:

The control center has been redesigned and the new version will soon enter the development version internal test.

There were indeed plenty of issues with the new iOS-like Control Center brought about with MIUI 12 and it’s great to see that Xiaomi is now focusing on fixing it.

Several users were also interested in knowing why flagships like the Mi 11 shipped with an older MIUI 12 version instead of the latest MIUI 12.5 to which the following justification was provided:

Before the phone is released, production and stocking will start long in advance, so it will be equipped with the latest MIUI stable version at the time of production of these phones. Therefore, Xiaomi Mi 11 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra are not equipped with MIUI 12.5 stable version

In short, plenty of promises have been made in this Q&A session. We are confident that all of these will be met. But as to when that will happen still remains a mystery.

Xiaomi hasn’t exactly had a clean track record when it comes to fixing bugs the past couple of years. Hence, we are all counting on a surprise with the upcoming MIUI 12.5 stable update.

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