What do you think of Lu's suggestion that MIUI 13 will be launched soon? "MIUI 12.5 is coming, can MIUI 1x be far behind?" ?

MIUI is the soul of Xiaomi mobile phone. I believe many people who buy Xiaomi mobile phones agree with this view. As the benchmark of domestic customization system, MIUI is far more humanized and intelligent than other Android systems, which provides some valuable references for many friends. At the same time, as one of the earliest manufacturers focusing on Android customization system in China, Xiaomi has also accumulated a huge user base based on MIUI.

Unfortunately, in recent years, with the catch-up of friends, the MIUI system that is too big to fail has been difficult to open the gap with domestic customization systems such as ColorOS and OriginOS. Unstable system experience, a large number of bugs and repeated public beta qualifications have successfully detonated the public opinion storm of MIUI 12, which has led to a certain degree of decline in the overall wind evaluation of MIUI.

As time goes by, MIUI's "one year older" is approaching again. Last night, Lu Zaiwei, partner of Xiaomi Group and general manager of Redmi brand, said on Weibo, "MIUI 12.5 is coming, will MIUI 1x be far behind?" The implication is that MIUI 13 is coming soon. Judging from the third batch of stable release plan of MIUI 12.5 enhanced version announced by Xiaomi, MIUI 13 is likely to be officially released in mid-February.

From the feedback of social media, MIUI users are still very concerned about system updates. At present, many functions of MIUI 13 have been leaked. Ray made a basic summary here. Let's take a look at what functions MIUI 13 will carry in the future. Can the appearance of MIUI 13 save the software attraction and user stickiness of Xiaomi mobile phone?

New interface, new function

Improve UI interface

Weibo blogger @ Digital Chat Station revealed earlier that MIUI 13 is expected to bring an improved user interface UI and release it to a series of Xiaomi/Redmi devices. Although the official hasn't disclosed the specific news, Xiao Lei has found some screenshots of MIUI 13 on Xiaomi Community, Weibo and some overseas platforms, showing some new UI changes.

Judging from the leaked screenshots, the overall style of MIUI 13 is more concise and light. The icon design adopts the popular acrylic material at present, and the control center has also been slightly changed. At the same time, we can also see the recently popular floating widget. Although the overall impression is not unexpected, it is still good.

In addition, according to the screenshot of the new file manager leaked by the digital chat station, the system application of MIUI 13 will adopt a brand-new visual style. Compared with the existing file manager, the file manager of MIUI 13 looks more refreshing and intuitive. In addition to commonly used documents, pictures, videos and other folders, users can also put cameras, WeChat, Weibo and other folders on the home page to reach the corresponding file classification more quickly, instead of always flipping the top classification bar as it is now.

"Reflective interaction" is the focus of MIUI design update in recent years. For example, MIUI 1 1 focuses on "brand-new sound, innovative efficiency", and uses linear motors and dynamic sound effects to tell users "what they are doing" more intuitively. MIUI 12 focuses on "natural touch", which provides different tactile feedback for different usage scenarios and enhances the interaction between users and mobile phones.

According to the introduction of the digital chat station, MIUI 13 has made many changes to the system UX (User Interactive Experience), but it will not bring new interactive experience, but bring two major updates: "Natural Touch 2.0" and "Gesture turbo 2.0", that is, smoother gesture operation and more varied tactile feedback. Instead of blindly adding new functions and choosing to optimize the existing interactive experience, Xiaomi's operation is still worthy of recognition.

As for the animation effect, Xiao Lei naturally cares more. After all, MIUI/KOOC-0/2/MIUI/KOOC-0/2.5 blew the animation technology all over, but in the end, the frames were frequently dropped and the animation was torn, and the comprehensive experience was even worse than MIUI/KOOC-0//KOOC-0/,which is one of the reasons why MIUI/KOOC-0/2 received bad reviews. Now it seems that MIUI 13 should not add new animation, but continue to optimize logic, reduce resource occupation and ensure fluency and stability. As for the effect, we may have to wait until the finished product comes out.

MIUI gadget

As shown in the screenshot leaked above, MIUI 13 will officially join the MIUI widget function, just like all domestic Android customization systems in recent years. This function can display the key information of the APP on the main screen and the negative screen, so that users can get real-time key information of high-frequency applications at a glance, such as daily itinerary, equipment power, notes, weather, express delivery, music and so on.

At present, this function has been tested in MIUI 12.5 development version. According to Lei's experience, the system applications that can be directly selected on the "Add Widgets" homepage include Xiaomi weather, calendar, clock, Xiaomi health, mobile phone housekeeper, Xiaomi notes, Xiaomi photo album, and third parties include QQ music, maps, WPS Office, etc. There are many widget styles to choose from in each application, which are much more beautiful and functional than native widgets.

However, in the actual experience, Xiao Lei found that the widget with negative screen returning animation was very stiff and had no sense of fluency. In addition, MIUI widgets currently supports a small number of third-party applications, which is still very limited in practical use. I hope this function can be perfectly adapted before the release of MIUI 13, otherwise it is likely to become the next "super wallpaper".

virtual memory

202 1, memory fusion or memory expansion technology seems to have become a fragrant bun, and many mobile phone manufacturers have mentioned it in their publicity. Xiaomi will naturally not miss this hot spot. According to the introduction of various manufacturers, memory expansion technology can provide 2~3GB of virtual memory for mobile phones to run background software and multitask.

Sounds great, doesn't it? But as we all know, there is no free lunch. At present, the memory expansion technology used by various manufacturers in the market basically compresses the inactive code parts running background applications and foreground applications into memory, then stores them in flash memory, and decompresses them when necessary. This method can indeed reduce the occupation of memory resources, but it may consume flash memory because of frequent reading and writing. At the same time, because the charging speed of flash memory is not as fast as that of memory+the processor needs to decompress the call, the speed of starting the application is obviously slow, which is a technology with advantages and disadvantages.

At present, the MIUI 12.5 development version has begun to test the gray scale of the "memory expansion" function, and interested users can see if this function exists in their mobile phone settings.

Global small window

Every time MIUI is updated on a large scale, users can actually find clues in the internal testing center, as well as the "global small window" function. In the past, Xiaomi users needed to cut out the background window and click the small window application/corresponding background application to open the small window mode, which was somewhat cumbersome.

After turning on the "global small window" function, Xiaomi users can quickly switch the small window mode of commonly used apps/quickly start the corresponding apps on the sidebar by swiping left/right on the edge of the screen, and users can also customize the sidebar application order.

In addition to the sidebar made by many manufacturers, MIUI 13 will also provide a "bubble" mode, allowing users to draw bubbles in the lower left corner of the screen for quick operation. Although these operation modes are not innovative functions, MIUI 13 improves the inconvenience of calling out in small window mode through "global small window" and makes the function itself more operational, which is a good thing.

Will you be spit out this time?

However, Xiaomi may not have thought that after suggesting that MIUI 13 is coming, social media is not the good news that a lot of rice noodles are waiting for. Users' spit on MIUI 12 has never stopped, and it has even intensified.

Why is this happening? There are two main reasons. First, the message "MIUI 13 will be released soon" was released together with the "MIUI 12.5 Enhanced Third Update Plan". In this update plan, users who bought Redmi K40G were surprised to find that the products they bought in the first half of this year were the same as those of Redmi K30U last year and Redmi K20 Pro the year before last.

Although Xiaomi officially explained the specific reasons, saying that the update speed of products is determined by chip manufacturers, from the reply of netizens, most people do not seem to agree with this statement. Some netizens even said: "There were many system problems before, and the Android version was not actively upgraded! When MIUI 13 is released, isn't it less for us? "

At this time, some readers may wonder: Since MediaTek is slower to adapt to Android, aren't all mobile phone brands in MediaTek slower than those in Qualcomm? The answer is really true. The problem is that other manufacturers' customization systems are generally not as unstable as MIUI. They may have fewer functions, but fewer bugs. They don't need to update the system as frequently as MIUI to ensure the normal operation of a large number of functions.

Xiao Lei thinks that MIUI 12' s ass-pulling is actually a big step, trying to do everything well in animation, function and framework ... and nothing well. After half a year's optimization, Xiaomi finally launched an enhanced version of MIUI 12.5 with relatively stable functions, but it was vomited by users because of its slow update speed.

What lessons can Xiaomi learn from these user feedbacks? First of all, compared with those seemingly cool and fresh functions, Xiaomi should provide sufficient R&D resources to solve the problems existing in MIUI 12.5. Judging from the current update of MIUI 13, they are really working hard in this direction. Secondly, how to improve the stability and experience of mass users as soon as possible is the next problem that Xiaomi needs to solve.

At the beginning of this paragraph, it is mentioned that the system update of MIUI is in batches, which is also one of the reasons for users' dissatisfaction. We must know that after the release of MIUI in past dynasties, the official version will basically be pushed within two to three months. Including the Spring Festival holiday, the first official version of MIUI 12.5 has been waiting for five months, not to mention the third batch. No matter how good the system is, what's the point of not using it yourself?

Rice flour is eagerly looking forward to a stable and easy-to-use system, and this expectation needs the due response from MIUI development team and Xiaomi Company as a whole. I hope MIUI 13 can live up to expectations, adapt and push in time, and truly achieve stability, reliability and smoothness. If these problems are not solved, then Xiaomi may face more than just users spitting.