MIUI 14 hands-on: what’s new in Xiaomi’s latest Android update

The Xiaomi 13 Pro (review), announced in February by the smartphone giant, is the first phone that comes with Xiaomi’s MIUI 14 out-of-the-box. Apart from some changes in the overall interface, you also have a few other software tricks to boost storage and memory on the device. Other flagship phones from last year such as 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 peek at what MIUI 14 offers on the Xiaomi 13 Pro.

Home screen and widgets

With the new MIUI update, users can customise their home screen more freely with widgets and icons to give them the most useful information at a glance. I added a few widgets that make my daily work more efficient and the interface arranged it in a tasteful manner.

The update also introduces card-style designs for certain utility tools such as battery life, clock, notes, security scanner, and more as well as apps like Spotify and YouTube Music. New wallpapers have been added and the icon sizes are now customisable to your liking. Even the settings app has seen a redesign with unnecessary tiles being removed to give the menu a cleaner look. 

Storage optimisations

Xiaomi claims that MIUI 14 will compress apps that are used less in order to save space. Over a period of three months, Xiaomi says that up to 3GB of storage can be saved. In addition, the update itself is said to be lighter than previous iterations with devices that have 128GB of internal storage saving upwards of 4GB.

If the graph provided by Xiaomi is anything to go by, MIUI 14’s system resources will occupy about two-thirds of the space that MIUI 13 did. There are some bootup optimisations as well which I definitely noticed when restarting the Xiaomi 13 Ultra.

Privacy and Xiaomi Sync

The new update is focussing more on privacy features as well, alongside on-device security. As I said in my review, the Xiaomi 13 Pro always does a security check on 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. This is being done to avoid any risk of data leaks during transmission, says the company. A native text recognition feature on the MIUI Gallery has been added for the same and it works for the most part.

Apart from that synchronisation between Xiaomi products like smartphones and tablets has become even easier. I did not have a Redmi Pad or Mi Pad 5 to test it out, but the company says that transferring files between the devices that have MIUI 14 should be as simple as drag and drop.