Officially announced in China alongside the new Xiaomi 12 flagship series, the MIUI 13 had not shown any trace of the Material You of Android 12 in the first tests, but the situation changed markedly after the release of a recent China Beta build: here are the First Signs of the Material You UI.
In recent weeks we have reported the Xiaomi and Redmi models that will receive the MIUI 13 Global Stable in the first quarter of the year, the first rollouts in China and the most recent ones, as well as the first global builds reserved for Mi Pilot testers. Now let’s go back to China and see how Xiaomi’s ROM is evolving from a graphic point of view.
MIUI 13 (China Beta): finally Material You
The Material You is one of the main distinctive features of Android 12, for this reason not finding it in the first tests of the MIUI 13 China Beta – on Xiaomi Mi 11X Pro – was a bitter surprise. Fortunately, a recent update of the same China Beta version of the ROM has finally implemented the Material You UI on compatible models and there is no denying: the dynamic theme system – which its Pixels is called Monet and which adapts all the colors of the user interface according to a palette that the system generates starting from the set background – gives a lot to MIUI.
Actually, that of Xiaomi is only a first implementation and not even particularly complete, given that the Material You UI of MIUI does not make any change to the colors of the accents, which remain fixed on the default Blue of MIUI 13. At the moment it is a wasted opportunity: Xiaomi’s ROM has always lent itself very well to customization and wasting this big possibility offered by Android 12 would be a real shame.
A further demonstration of the still embryonic stage of this implementation comes from the quick toggle panel, where MIUI 13 still leaves unchanged that Control Center closer to the style of iOS than to that of Android 12. Right now, in short, the first real traces of Material You can be found in Google applications: for now, the various Gmail, Clock, Calendar, Chrome and related widgets adapt to the background colors.
None of the system applications are moving in the same direction and this is also true for the Settings. The approach adopted by Xiaomi, therefore, is currently far from that chosen by Samsung for the One UI 4 and by OPPO for the ColorOS 12.
