MIUI 14 With Photon Engine, Core System Improvements Announced; Coming to Xiaomi, Redmi Phones in January

MIUI 14 was unveiled by Xiaomi at a virtual event by the company which also saw the launch of the Xiaomi 13, the company's flagship smartphone series. The Chinese firm also launched the Xiaomi Mini PC, Xiaomi Watch S2, and the Xiaomi Buds 4 at the event. The new custom skin was initially planned to be launched on December 1, but the event was postponed by the company. The latest update is claimed to provide improved memory utilisation through an optimised firmware, and increased efficiency in app memory usage, while also limiting the number of pre-loaded applications that can't be offloaded to 8, according to the company.

MIUI 14 rollout schedule

According to the company's official handle on Chinese microblogging website Weibo ,the MIUI 14 will first be rolled out by Xiaomi to the Xiaomi 12s Ultra, Xiaomi 12S Pro, Xiaomi 12S, Xiaomi 12 Pro, Xiaomi 12 Pro Dimensity Edition, Xiaomi 12, Xiaomi MIX Fold 2, Redmi K50 Pro, Redmi K50 Extreme Edition, Redmi K50 Gaming Edition, and Redmi K50 from January 2023 onwards, according to the announcement made by Xiaomi during the launch event.

Meanwhile, in terms of the MIUI 14 update for tablets, the Mi Pad 5 Pro 12.4, Mi Pad 5 Pro 5G, Mi Pad 5 Pro (Wi-Fi), Mi Pad 5, and Redmi Pad will begin from April 2023 onwards.

However, Xiaomi has not provided any confirmation on when we could expect the MIUI 14 to roll out in global markets, including India. The company is also yet to announce a list of other devices that are eligible to receive the latest system upgrade.

MIUI 14 features

The latest MIUI 14 update from Xiaomi is said to be built on MIUI's Project Razor, to make the system as light as possible. MIUI 14's photon engine operates on the underlying Android kernel which can be accessed by third-party app developers, according to the company.

Xiaomi claims that the system is smoother, and more fluent in high-performance scenarios by 60 percent than its predecessor, MIUI 13. The energy consumption by third-party applications has also been claimed to be improved by 22 percent.

MIUI 14 introduces features that allows users to clean applications, save only one duplicate copy of a file, and compress applications that are not used regularly, to save space.

Connectivity on MIUI 14 is also claimed to have been improved with MIUI Interconnection now improving earphone discovery speed by 50 percent, connectivity speed of mobile TV by 12 percent, and the speed of image transmission during streaming by 77 percent.

In terms of personalisation, Xiaomi has introduced minimalistic changes that the company claims are “small changes [that] make a big difference.” Icons on MIUI 14 can now be customised to 4 size options. Meanwhile, the company has also introduced a feature to allow users to include stickers of flowers and pets on the home screen.

The notification system on MIUI 14 has also been improved to reduce cluttering and overuse of memory, according to the company.

With regards to privacy, the system on MIUI 14 has been improved to ensure that computing data covering over 30 system scenarios are all stored locally rather than in the cloud. Image and text extraction will be performed locally on MIUI 14.

MIUI 14 also improved its real-time bilingual subtitles features for video conferencing, recording, and translations to be more confidential, according to Xiaomi.