With the launch of the Xiaomi Mi 14 series, the company surprisingly announced a new custom Android operating system called HyperOS that will replace MIUI.
Now that the first phones with HyperOS are starting to hit the market, we’re finding that despite the radical name change, HyperOS isn’t all that different — at least on the surface.
People who are used to MIUI will feel right at home using HyperOS. Aside from some graphical changes, the overall aesthetic remains pretty much the same.
Xiaomi is obviously paying more attention to the underlying changes and optimizations of HyperOS. Or at least the first version of the new operating system based on Android 14. Let’s get these issues out of the way before making the actual functional and user-facing changes.
Low-level optimization
Xiaomi says one of the major changes is how HyperOS handles and schedules hardware resources, resulting in lower latency and faster switching between tasks. This should be especially useful for low-end devices.
Thanks to storage optimization, HyperOS promises at least 50 months of performance degradation-free experience and lower storage requirements. The new operating system is more lightweight than MIUI 14 – the size has been reduced by 3.5GB and is now 9GB.
Faster OTA downloads and smaller OTA update storage footprint are also part of the update.
Last but not least, the Pro HDR feature is also coming to Xiaomi devices – of course, these devices have the hardware to support it. Viewing photos taken with HDR in the default Gallery app will take advantage of the HDR-capable display on your phone. However, unlike the Pixel, Galaxy S series, and iPhone, the Pro HDR feature is only supported within the gallery, so HDR photos uploaded online will not be displayed differently. Maybe Xiaomi plans full integration in the future, but definitely not now.
This should be a feature baked into Android 14 by default, as the phone will now store HDR metadata on standard JPG images, so they can be viewed in HDR format in any app or gallery.
Novelty in design and user interface
HyperOS is designed around the Alive design philosophy, using a dynamic and cheerful color palette common in nature, notably flowers, the subtle curvature of windows, buttons and other UI elements, and new optimized fonts. The fonts are reportedly carefully optimized for a variety of scripts, not just Latin.
Lock screen • Home screen • Recent apps
New animation around the status bar provides contextual information. For example, when charging, a subtle pop-up appears showing the battery percentage as well as the charging rate. The wireless headset’s battery status also briefly displays on the status bar.
New status notification
To further enhance the visual experience, HyperOS supports more advanced and complex rendering, giving the impression of more realistic objects and material design elements. We’re talking about weather visualization, light transitions, transparent elements, textures, and more. However, this feature requires more powerful phone support because it requires more hardware resources.
Regardless of form factor, interaction with windows is seamless. Windows is very flexible and can adapt to different display types, which in turn means HyperOS is more foldable and tablet-friendly.
Floating windows and multitasking
Subjectively speaking, HyperOS is just a more refined version of MIUI. Frosted glass effects, pop-up textures, and HDR-like effects for some dialogue make everything look more polished and smooth.
custom made
The usual customization features are already in place, but there are some new additions and changes. Here are the lock screen options available. You can build a theme from scratch or use a specific style and adjust it to your liking.
Customization options and themes
There are also new lock screen styles here. You can select pictures and apply different effects.
Lock screen style and customization
As always, we have tons of wallpapers, themes, fonts, and icons from the community. The Always-on feature is also highly customizable but remains unchanged from MIUI.
AoD options
The rest is business as usual, except that you can no longer choose between the classic-style notification shade and Control Center. The latter is the only option now. The phones that initially launched MIUI still retained the old-style notification bar.
Control Center and media playback controls
When it comes to the notification shade, there are a lot of customization options available.
Notification options
You can use HyperOS’s notification card style with full-blown icons from apps that send notifications, or you can use the default Android style cards with a more minimalist and flat icon style. The latter style also offers larger and expandable cards.
notification card
You can choose between an app drawer or a simple home screen, while the recent apps menu allows for vertical or horizontal arrangement.
app drawer
Connecting devices and multitasking
HyperOS allows for deeper integration with devices connected to your home network and those logged into your personal Xiaomi account. Of course, this isn’t new to MIUI users, but HyperOS offers deeper integration with other Mi Share-enabled devices.
Connection options
You can now multitask and cast your screen to other devices (tablets and PCs) instead of just sending files. It’s not an entirely desktop-like experience, though. Samsung and Motorola still have the upper hand here.
Still, Xiaomi has managed to achieve a sense of continuity – you can share your clipboard with other devices, use your phone’s camera to attach photos in the Notes app (while working on a computer or tablet), and pick up where you left off Continue listening to music wherever you connect the headphones to your smartphone. You can even sync themes and colors across devices, similar to Windows’ cross-device appearance sync.
Artificial Intelligence Features
With HyperOS, Xiaomi has also followed the AI trend. Google’s Pixel phones offered AI-related features for the first time with the launch of the Pixel 7 series, and Samsung has also focused heavily on AI this year. Xiaomi promises similar features and even touts digital processing capabilities on the device. This means the device is able to process all LLM data without needing to be connected to the cloud, so all your AI functions should also work offline thanks to NPU optimization.
However, we can’t find any advertised AI-related features on the Mi 14 or Mi 13 Ultra, both of which run the latest version of HyperOS. This is because these features are in beta development and are only available to beta testers, so expect a wider rollout in the future.
Just like the previous two generations of the Pixels and Galaxy S series, compatible Xiaomi phones running HyperOS can transcribe live conversations and generate subtitles in videos and third-party apps.
Both of these features also work with video chat apps, so you don’t have to take notes during meetings as the AI will do it for you.
The default Gallery app has also been improved. The search understands context and provides intelligent search – just like the Google Photos app.
Xiaomi has also taken advantage of the generative capabilities of artificial intelligence. In addition to the usual editing toolset, the Gallery app now offers AI portraits. It generates your images by analyzing a database of your existing photos. Using the same AI-generated portraits, you can place yourself in an environment of your choice – snowy peaks, tropical islands, you name it.
AI Expansion is another editing tool that allows you to expand scenes in existing photos. AI is able to understand the context in an image and expand the background, hence the tool’s name, “AI Expansion.”
Safety
Security is an important part of every operating system, and Xiaomi has made some efforts in this regard. The self-developed TEE security system – hardware-level security – stores all your sensitive data on independent micro-kernels. It protects your fingerprint and facial data as well as hidden or locked files and photos. Interestingly, TEE is present on all devices that support HyperOS.
wrap up
Although HyperOS is not a complete overhaul of MIUI from a user’s perspective, it is a more refined customized Android skin while retaining the functionality of MIUI and even upgrading it in this regard, mainly thanks to AI-related features .
We also like the small changes in the UI design that improve the overall experience without sacrificing process performance. HyperOS is as fast and smooth as ever, and is now expected to stay that way for many years of use.
We just wish more native Android features made their way into Xiaomi’s proprietary overlay. We’re still waiting for notification history (an Android 11 feature), and we’d like to see Pro HDR implemented across the board and not just in Xiaomi’s default Gallery app.