MIUI 11 Review: Iterating on an excellent but imperfect experience

The latest upgrade to MIUI 11 will not change the minds of MIUI's haters, but it offers many iterative improvements to MIUI's many strengths and I would heartily recommend it to any with an open mind who want a feature-rich, attractive, unified, and stable software experience.

Xiaomi's MIUI has remained amongst the most contentious Android skins over its many years featuring in Xiaomi's generally aggressively-priced smartphones, even with the huge improvements Xiaomi has been noted to have engineered in recent years.

This contention persisted even with Xiaomi's drastically-lightened 2018 redesign of MIUI 10, though it was recognised for its smooth performance and great battery-conserving features and thus won a decent few hearts over, including mine upon my recent purchase of a Xiaomi Mi 9T which shipped running MIUI 10.

But now MIUI 11, based on Android 10 for most Xiaomi devices (with the few exceptions to soon be upgraded), is upon us and arrives as more an iteration of MIUI 10 than an all-new skin, but it does feature a plethora of design and functionality improvements which constitute a much better experience overall.

Design

MIUI 11 doesn't deviate significantly from MIUI 10's visual stylings, but it does refine and rethink certain aspects of the UI, chief among the improvements and emblematic of them all is MIUI 11's new Milan Pro poly-linguistic font with a more geometric and scaleable – and attractive – typography.

MIUI 11 also introduces a fresh and in some cases long-overdue refresh of the iconography; both in the default app icon pack where icons are far more unified and attractive rounded squares, and also in the settings and other system areas where the iconography has improved readability and general attractiveness as expected.

MIUI 11 also delivers an improved system dark mode over MIUI 10's already great optional colour scheme, integrated with Android 10's own dark mode as well, meaning more system apps are supported and third-party apps will also be toggled where supported.

MIUI 11 also introduces a more configurable always-on display with the ability to customise certain preset layouts and/or use your own short text always-on display in a myriad of colours.

Finally, MIUI 11 also refreshes the entire UI with flatter and simpler ethos and much less clutter, as this gif of the remade WiFi settings exemplifies:

Visuals are only one facet of design though, and on the audio front little is changed. MIUI 11 does add a few new ringtones and notification sounds though, including a ‘nature' audio scheme featuring an automatic time-of-day adaptive set of notification noises which switch to time-appropriate noises such as crickets at night-time, as well as similarly-functional alarms; a trivial but pleasant experience boost which I do now use myself.

So MIUI 11 does not present any revolutionary departure from the design language of MIUI 10, but it does offer a large set of small improvements which constitute an ever more cohesive and attractive package.

Performance

Ont0 the performance front and there is little to say as MIUI 11 sees very few changes from MIUI 10 given the experience was already fluid and very stable, on most devices at least. However, MIUI 11 does benefit from the small performance improvements Android 10 gained over Pie and overall does feel just that extra bit nicer.

On stability though and in my experience I've been fortunate enough to encounter literally zero bugs from both of MIUI 10 and MIUI 11 – this is not a universal experience as users on other devices, lower-end devices in particular, have reported significant issues – but for myself, and most others I've seen on Xiaomi's upper-midrange handsets have had similarly painless experiences.

Functionality

As I've previously iterated, MIUI 11 sticks much to the designs and functions of its predecessor, MIUI 10, and this includes many considerations that I have come to love: considerations such as:

• The brightness and volume sliders being ‘relative' positioning rather than absolute, meaning that rather than jumping to where you touch the sliders, they will move with your finger movements relative to the point of first contact.
• Then there's the fact that MIUI maintains the excellent functionality of expanding quick-toggles within the notification shade, rather than having to be transported to settings first as recent version of Android have inexplicably decided to do.
• I also love how MIUI adds in little extra features to all their apps that just contribute to quality-of-life in so many small ways which add up to a far greater experience; such as the Messaging app being searchable for contacts and keywords, dates, etc… and it also displays the total number of messages on your device in that search bar.
• Or how the notification shade tells you in an unobtrusive way how much mobile data you have used today and this month.
• Or the fact that you can change all three audio levels (notifications, alarms, entertainment) and toggle silent and DND modes all from the volume slider – like Android 10 teased but never actually delivered.
• And there's also the incredibly functional calculator app with its plethora of standard scientific calculator functions as well as preset equations for a great many functions such as taxes.
• I love how MIUI keeps notifications as small as possible when in landscape mode so they don't cover the video or game you may be enjoying.
• I also love MIUI's File Explorer app. It's one of the most functional out there while also being attractive and fully-featured, with only a few minor quirks.

But, as I said, MIUI 11 doesn't add much more on top of this in terms of functionality. There are some notable improvements though, probably most notable (to those for whom it is useful) being ‘Mi Share'; Xiaomi, Redmi, Oppo, Vivo, and Realme's response/replica of Apple's semi-popular ‘Airdrop'. Mi Share is primarily targeted to Asian audiences and, as my comparison implies, is a local-area file-sharing protocol.

There are also a few improvements on the previously mentioned Mi Explorer app, primarily a semi-integration with WPS Office to view and (with a download of WPS Office) edit documents.

MIUI 11, based on Android 10, also finally enables Android Pie's quick reply feature for universal notification reply suggestions – when enabled (it is not by default).

So while MIUI 11 doesn't introduce a huge swathe of features, it builds off the base of MIUI 10's already powerful and broad and so is hardly lacking in this area (if the size of this section, of which I have condensed far more than I could have, doesn't give that away).

Battery

MIUI 10 was already famous for its broad battery-conservation techniques which facilitated excellent longevity on even relatively low-capacity phones like Xiaomi's Mi 9 (3100mAh), and that longevity has been one of Xiaomi's selling factors for years.

With MIUI 11 though, Xiaomi has been able to amazingly further their battery life significantly, at least partially thanks to Android 10's primary benefits in the battery department, which have seen my Mi 9T's already excellent battery life extend by an extra 30-50% for beyond an all-day experience.

This excellent battery has been experienced by almost all running the latest MIUI 11 with the exception of those who, for whatever reason, have had MIUI 11 randomly remove all apps from Xiaomi's ‘smart battery saving' mode which manages app background usage; an issue which can easily (if tediously) be remedied by re-adding all apps (except any for which you require absolutely timely notifications and function) to said battery saving mode in the ‘App Management' settings area.

Issues

Unfortunately, MIUI 10 was not without its fair share of issues – from quirky or lacking UI and UX, to actual bugs or glitches of the kind which do not risk stability of the system or apps.

As explained above, MIUI 11 appears pretty stable and I've not had any crashes or anything obvious of the sort, but unfortunately it has not fixed the sorts of other issues which rather those which prevent or break certain functionality, and again, I have experienced a decent few of these:

Chief among the issues I have experienced and unfortunately continue to experience are issues with Google account synchronisation, where my primary account refuses to reliably and continually sync all of my calendars, reminders, Assistant reminders (a big one for me), and various other Google-related information, and none of the fixes I've tried have remedied the situation. Note that this is an issue I do not face on any other Android devices, and thus must be a MIUI-related problem.

On the other type of uncritical issue I mentioned above – UI/UX – and MIUI has an annoying and unalterable design where only some types and sources of notifications display on the lockscreen, and furthermore notifications do not reappear on the lockscreen once the device has been unlocked, even if those notifications are not acted upon in any way.

So while MIUI 11 remains a pretty rock-solid ROM, it does nevertheless experience its share of baffling design decisions and occasionally broken features.

Closing

So, to conclude, Xiaomi's 2019 Android skin MIUI 11 does not present a drastically altered new experience over its 2018 MIUI 10 predecessor which did set a new groundwork with its sweeping redesign.

MIUI 11 does, however, gracefully refine Xiaomi's Android skin with a simpler and more enjoyable refreshed design, and delivers certain key improvements to battery life and other certain functionalities which constitute a wonderful, if iterative and still imperfect Android experience.