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Early on Wednesday, Xiaomi launched the international version of its custom MIUI 7 ROM, which can be installed not just on Xiaomi phones, but also on a bunch of other devices officially. However, much to the disappointment of a lot of Xiaomi customers, MIUI 7 has reportedly failed to deliver Lollipop goodness to all devices which have received – or are in the process of receiving – the update. Quite a few handsets like the Redmi 1S, has apparently been left stranded on Android 4.4 KitKat, even after its upgrade from MIUI 6 to MIUI 7. While Xiaomi has taken the pain to explain a number of times that MIUI 7 is not based on any single version of Android, most expected MIUI 7 to be built exclusively on Android Lollipop, leading to confusion, disappointment and even the occasional bout of fury directed against Xiaomi.
To set the record straight, MIUI development engineer Sun Peng has now come forward, and through a post on the country’s largest microblogging site Weibo, issued a statement in an effort to clarify the company’s position on the MIUI 7 update. According to him, it isn’t Xiaomi, but the chipmakers who are to be held responsible for failing to provide updated kernel codes for their chipsets so that they can support the latest version of Android. He pleaded helplessness, and even went to the extent of saying that his team is tired having to cater to so many different branches, and it would have just been easier to have just the single version of MIUI 7, based off of a singular Android version (Lollipop), rather than doing two different versions.
As for the MIUI 7 ROM, while the version based off of KitKat may not bring along all the feature and security enhancements that come with Lollipop, Xiaomi claims that the ROM will increase performance by speeding UI interactions up by as much as 30 percent, which will be appreciated by users in their day-to-day usage. From initial reports, there seem to be some further changes in the design language as well. While all that alone won’t help ease the anger of not getting updated to Lollipop, users will hopefully get a better overall experience with the new update from Xiaomi, irrespective of whether it comes with KitKat or Lollipop underneath.
