Xiaomi has announced that it’s dropping its long-running MIUI mobile operating system in favour of a new OS called HyperOS.
The Chinese manufacturer has announced that the new HyperOS will be rolling out globally with the forthcoming flagship Xiaomi 14 series, and that it will gradually replace MIUI across the board.
Xiaomi VP Alvin Tse has taken to Twitter/X to claim that HyperOS will usher in a “new era of Hyper Performance, fluidity and connectivity across Smartphones x AIoT”.
While it’s been around for 13 years, it’s fair to say that we haven’t always been the biggest fans of MIUI. Xiaomi makes outstanding and competitively priced hardware (see the recent Xiaomi 13T Pro for an example), but we always come tend to come away bemoaning the company’s custom UI.
While functional and highly customisable, MIUI is widely held to be “cluttered and frustrating to use” (to quote from our own 13T Pro review), at least in Western markets.
While HyperOS is evidently more than a mere rebranding exercise, we’re hoping that Xiaomi has heard the feedback and opted to trim some of the fat. If it does so, it could be in line to trouble the league tables outside of the markets closer to home where it’s already dominant.
This affects much more than the premium Xiaomi brand itself, of course. For several years now, the company has been the most prolific manufacturer on the budget phone scene with its Poco and Redmi sub-brands.
In other words, a brand new Xiaomi OS should be taken as major news for anyone intending to shop around for a new phone over the next year or so – regardless of budget.
Indeed, HyperOS will go way beyond smartphones, and will run on Xiaomi devices in the smart home field and beyond.
According to a Weibo post (via Android Authority) from Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun, HyperOS is “based on the integration of the deeply evolved Android and the self-developed Vela system, completely rewriting the underlying architecture, and preparing a public base for the Internet of Everything for tens of billions of devices and tens of billions of connections in the future.”
We should be getting our first proper glimpse at HyperOS when the Xiaomi 14 is launched over the coming weeks.
