MIUI global beta ends from 1 July

The notification

Xiaomi announced on 9 June that Changes coming to Chinese beta MIUI releases, and entry-level Redmi phones won't get weekly updates. 5 days later, on June 14, Mi Community announced on the Mi Community forum that there will be no more public global beta MIUI, this does not apply to stable ROMs of course.

About ROMs

The MIUI ROMs found on most Xiaomi devices (except Android One, and Go devices: Mi A1, A2, Redmi Go) come in 2 flavours: Chinese and global. Within both of these flavours, there are 2 further releases: stable and beta. If you are buying a Xiaomi phone in Hungary, you most likely have a global stable ROM, but those who are not afraid of one or two minor bugs, like to see first hand what's new and get feedback on it, could easily switch to global beta, so they get MIUI updates every week instead of 1-2 months. I did the same on my Mi 6. The MIUI HU, and Xiaomi.eu ROMs are Chinese based, they are covered by the article linked above.

The reason

As more and more devices are released, more and more people have started using beta ROM on their everyday phones, but beta ROM is designed for public testing and requires a high tolerance for minor bugs. MIUI beta versions are released early in development to provide feedback to the really hard core R&D team to ensure that stable ROMs can be released as soon as possible and without bugs. So the primary purpose of beta ROMs is to provide feedback, not to allow users to use new features still in development earlier, but developers have noticed that many beta users are running beta ROMs on their phones just to use new features as soon as possible. In order to release new features more frequently than the current stable ROMs, but already in a stable version, MIUI software engineers have decided to will end the public release of global beta ROMs from 1 July.

After 1 July

Despite this news, they promise that they will continue to communicate with users across platforms and focus on making stable versions of MIUI as stable and better as possible. They also say that this decision will allow them to release a more optimized, stable version of MIUI more frequently than they do now, which will provide a great experience for everyone, including entry-level and older devices. They also promise to deliver security updates in a timely manner.

What should I do if I am using a global beta ROM?

After the global beta ROMs are no longer released, affected devices will receive an OTA update as if it were just a new version, which will revert the phone's software back to a stable version. And if you want to switch back now, you can do it the same way you switched to beta, either by loading the downloaded stable recovery ROM from the update app or by using Mi Flash Tool to fastboot ROM.

Opinion

I had several Xiaomi phones, but they had custom ROMs more than stable MIUI. True, I didn't send so much feedback either, so I really used global beta ROMs to try new features early. A promise is a nice word, if they keep it so good, let's trust Xiaomi to really release stable ROMs more stable and more often by this decision, well I will be curious.