For a few days, on the net, there has been talking of MIUI 13.5, or the new version of its proprietary interface that Xiaomi would be working on. Months have passed since the announcement of the current MIUI 13, first released in China and now also in the roll-out phase here in the West, including Italy. And although it does not lack software bugs, for the moment the release seems to be more stable than the previous MIUI 12.
The last major update had raised certain anger in the community, given the number of bugs present, to the point of pushing the company to release an intermediate major update. Unfortunately, even the subsequent MIUI 12.5 did not meet the expectations of the users, dragging along numerous bugs from the 12. Here, therefore, MIUI 12.5 was followed by an MIUI 12.5 Enhanced born to fill the performance problems on less equipped devices.
Is Xiaomi really preparing the update to MIUI 13.5?
In light of this, does it make sense to talk about MIUI 13.5? Apparently yes, at least according to some reference sites that talk about it as if it were certain that it already exists. First of all, however, Xiaomi has not yet minimally hinted at the possible existence of a “.5” release of MIUI 13. But if we wanted to play the hypothesis game, we must first understand how Xiaomi develops its ROMs and consequently the number of versions.
First of all, I invite you to retrieve two guides: At MIUI school and The meaning of the letters MIUI, both useful for understanding acronyms like MIUI 12.5.6.0.RFACNXM mean. Acronyms like these help us understand how software development by the MIUI team is going. For example, when a major update is announced, as in the case of MIUI 13, 12, 11, etc., it is released with a numbering like this: V13.0.X.0. In this case, the numbers that interest us are the first two: in this example, 13 indicates the MIUI version, while 0 indicates that this ROM is part of the initial development phase of the update.
It may happen that an update does not progress from the initial phase and remains firm on its novelties and features, without major changes. For example, if you take Xiaomi Mi 9, you can see how MIUI 11 is advanced without any particular news, starting from MIUI V11.0.2.0 up to V11.0.9.0 (and then moving on to MIUI 12). On the contrary, there have been more “jagged” releases: if you take Xiaomi Mi 6, you start from MIUI V9.0.5.0 to switch to V9.2.3.0, V9.5.8.0 and V9.6.3.0 (and then MIUI 10). In all this, each smartphone can have versions of the ROM different from others, as each ROM must also accommodate the features it presents. For example, Xiaomi Mi 9T and Mi 9T Pro received the update to MIUI 12.1, while other smartphones from the same period went from MIUI 12 to 12.5.
MIUI 12 and 12.5: will MIUI 13 follow MIUI 13?
In short, as you will have understood the development of the MIUI versions is a complex topic as it does not follow pre-established binaries but adapts according to the circumstances. And these can concern both the general progress of the development of MIUI and some specific smartphones and the related software needs. If you look at past releases, we can trace the following history (including partial releases and/or only for some models):
- MIUI 13
- MIUI 12 – 12.1 – 12.5
- MIUI 11
- MIUI 10 – 10.1 – 10.2 – 10.3 – 10.4
- MIUI 9 – 9.2 – 9.5 – 9.6
- MIUI 8 – 8.1 – 8.2 – 8.5
- MIUI 7 – 7.1 – 7.2 – 7.3 – 7.5
In light of this trend, it is not possible to say with certainty that MIUI 13.5 will be made. Of course, in the last 7 years and related releases, we have had 4 “0.5” versions out of 7, so it is not such an implausible hypothesis. But there is still no proof that can make us say with certainty that MIUI 13.5 will be done. Also because its non-existence would mean that the MIUI 13 does not need any tweaks, which would be excellent news in terms of stability and software defragmentation.