The Xiaomi 13 Pro (Review), announced by the smartphone giant in February, is the first phone to come with Xiaomi’s MIUI 14 out-of-the-box. Apart from some changes to the overall interface, you also have some other software tricks to increase the storage and memory on the device. Other flagship phones from last year such as the Xiaomi 12 series, and more affordable offerings like the Redmi Note 11 and 10 series are also in line to receive the update. Here’s a glimpse of what MIUI 14 has to offer on the Xiaomi 13 Pro.
Home Screen & Widgets
With the new MIUI update, users can more freely customize their home screen with widgets and icons so that they can get the most useful information at a glance. I’ve added a few widgets that make my daily work more efficient and the interface is organized in a tasteful way.
The update also introduces a card-style design for apps like Spotify and YouTube Music, along with some utility tools like battery life, clock, notes, security scanner, and more. New wallpapers have been added and icon sizes are now customizable to your liking. Even the Settings app has seen a redesign with the removal of unnecessary tiles to give the menus a cleaner look.
storage optimization
Xiaomi claims that MIUI 14 will compress less-used apps to save space. Xiaomi says that up to 3GB of storage can be saved over a three-month period. Furthermore, the update is said to be lighter than previous iterations, with 128GB of internal storage saving up from 4GB.
If the graph provided by Xiaomi is anything to go by, MIUI 14’s system resources will occupy almost two-thirds of MIUI 13’s. There are also some bootup optimizations that I definitely noticed while restarting the Xiaomi 13 Ultra.
Privacy and Xiaomi Sync
The new update is focusing more on on-device security as well as privacy features. As I said in my review, the Xiaomi 13 Pro always does a security check of apps that are installed outside the Play Store. With MIUI 14, personal files will be processed on-device using any of the 10 native Xiaomi apps present on the device. The company says that this is being done to avoid any risk of data leaking during transmission. A basic text recognition feature on MIUI Gallery has been added for the same and it works for the most part.
Furthermore, syncing between Xiaomi products such as smartphones and tablets has become even easier. I didn’t have a Redmi Pad or Mi Pad 5 to test it with, but the company says that transferring files between devices with MIUI 14 should be as easy as drag and drop.
