Xiaomi promises to knock it off with at least some of the obnoxious MIUI ads (Update: More info)

Update, June 10, 2019 (12:27PM EST): Taking to Weibo earlier today, a MIUI Experience Product Director announced the following improvements in regards to MIUI’s use of advertisements:

• The company has already reduced the number of places in MIUI where advertisements are served and will continue to make reductions in the next two months.
• The company will make sure that no “vulgar” advertisements will be shown to users, especially in the notifications.
• The MIUI browser app will show fewer advertisements within 2-3 months.
• All advertisements will be clearly disclosed to the user, and users will have the express ability to suspend or close ads.
• Xiaomi will make it easier to find advertisement controls in MIUI system apps and settings.

The MIUI Experience Product Director also promised to make MIUI lighter for users, though the commitment is for the Chinese version.

Original article, April 3, 2019 (12:35PM EST): If you don’t own a Xiaomi phone, you might be surprised to learn that the Android skin that comes with the company’s devices — known as MIUI — features system-wide advertisements. If you own a Xiaomi phone, you already know how annoying those ads can be.

Thankfully, Xiaomi just committed to at the very least cutting back on some of the more obnoxious system ads on its devices. In a series of posts on Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo (via XDA Developers), Xiaomi Product director Mr. Wang Teng Thomas — claiming to speak for Xiaomi CEO Mr. Lei Jun — committed to removing the ads that most negatively affect the user experience in MIUI.

Which ads those might be, we don’t know. However, the removal of any system-wide ads will likely be greeted warmly by Xiaomi smartphone owners.

In related news, the company also committed to bringing new features to MIUI. It is asking users to vote on the three features of a set of six that they think should be prioritized over the others. The six proposed features are:

• Support for WeChat / QQ call recording.
• Local recycle bin for SMS, Photos, Documents, and other files that gets deleted automatically after 3 days.
• Magnifying glass triggered by shortcut key to help users zoom into a picture or text.
• New Notification box with custom filters where notifications that are not read for 12-hours are added. It will not be cleared with one-click cleaning. Users can browse and find them and clear later.
• Ultimate Power Saving mode to let users only use SMS and Phone.
• Curriculum viewing and alerting in a calendar for a schedule of different events in a day.

It should be noted that these features are coming to the Chinese variant of MIUI. It’s likely they will also come to the global version, but the voting and feature commitment is just for the Chinese ROM for now.

It also is unclear whether these features are coming to MIUI 10 (the latest version) or MIUI 11, which is still in development. It’s likely to be the latter but it’s certainly possible it could be the former.

If you own a Xiaomi device and this news about a reduction in ads makes you happy, let us know in the comments!

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