Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro long-term review

MIUI 12: New animations, design

While we were using it for this long-term review, our Mi 10 Pro got the update to MIUI 12, after having launched with MIUI 11. Both of these are based on Android 10 on this model, but MIUI 12 introduces some interesting changes in both design language and the overall user experience.

We'll start with the latter. As hinted at on the previous page, in our subjective opinion, MIUI 12 has the best use of animations we've ever seen on a smartphone. It's also got the best use of gentle, nudge-like vibrations made possible by its amazing vibration motor. These short and sweet vibrations occur all over the UI, when you interact with various elements, and serve you some gentle tactile feedback alongside what you see on the screen. This makes for a great improvement in usability, as it just makes the entire experience of using the phone more... physical, for lack of a better word. More tactile, if you will.

There is still room for improvement, but so far, MIUI 12 has taken this idea the furthest, and we're interested to see how this will be enhanced in future iterations. We're not sure if these nudges are there on other phones running the new skin version, and if they are, we're not sure how well they may be perceived when delivered by the sort of inferior vibration motor that Xiaomi has been using on all of its non-flagship phones in the past. But on the Mi 10 Pro, this is a very good enhancement of the overall experience, even though it is subtle.

The new animations seem very well thought through, and very carefully and deliberately designed to add to the UX, not just make you wait around pointlessly. As a design philosophy, we can definitely get behind this. The animations aren't necessarily longer or shorter than 'stock' Android or any other skin, they're just... better. And they make it feel like every action magically 'flows' into the next, with no weird hiccups or jumps. You can also set notification animations, so the screen lights up with a few effects, primarily focused on the edges. We've seen other manufacturers do this, and it's there in MIUI 12 as well.

Notifications area and Quick Settings

Design-wise, MIUI 12 doesn't stray too far from MIUI 11, but it does feature some new graphics and an overall cleaner aesthetic. Everything looks cleaner, and the new design overall feels like a breath of fresh air - both compared to MIUI 11 and most competing Android skins out there today. The new graphics are cool too, if perhaps a bit too playful for some - we're thinking of the About phone page, the battery capacity graphic, and the one showing your storage.

Fresh new design

Regardless of how you feel about those specifically, we like that Xiaomi isn't afraid to experiment here, and didn't shy away from being a bit bold with the changes introduced. Although this will instantly be recognizable as MIUI, it comes with a ton of very small changes that add up to a significantly improved user experience compared to its predecessor, and, dare we say it - most other Android iterations out there, including Google's. If you're not a fan of the look of the default theme, you'll be happy to know that the theme store is now finally available in the European region again, so you can pick and choose from what seems to be thousands of designs.

Themes

If you were a fan of having options and choices everywhere, regarding pretty much everything, don't worry - most of those have been retained. You can still customize things to your heart's content, but everything works very well out of the box, so if you aren't one who's inclined to do some endless tinkering, you won't be forced into weird submenus of submenus. You can pretty much use MIUI 12 as it comes with the default settings with no pains, but if you want to explore all it can do, there's a world of Settings just waiting for you to go through.

Settings

Interestingly, MIUI 12 also comes with two 'firsts' for us in a long-term review. One of those is the fact that we didn't have to do any deep-dives into Settings to get our wearable's companion app to behave the way it should. In the past, this has always been a necessity, but in our European build of MIUI 12, that wasn't warranted anymore. Things 'just work', without any weird and needless shutdowns of background processes - or at least, not the essential ones. We also didn't have any issues whatsoever with notification delivery for any of our 200+ apps, but that's been true of MIUI 11 as well.

App drawer

Additionally, MIUI 12 is the first iteration of the skin in which the built-in launcher comes with an app drawer. In the past, when reviewing a Xiaomi device, we resorted to installing the company's own Poco Launcher to get around this issue, because no matter how hard we want to try and use the default launcher in such a scenario, with 200+ apps installed, that's just untenable without an app drawer. Of course, there are countless other alternative launchers in the Play Store, we went with the Poco Launcher just because it's also made by Xiaomi, and somehow that felt like the right move on a Xiaomi handset.

New launcher with app drawer and Google Discover feed

If you have, in the past, been irked by the lack of the app drawer, it's finally there. And that's just about all we can say about it. It works as it should, showing all your apps in a list. Customization options exist, and some are in fact reminiscent of the Poco Launcher's, like the automatic app categorization. The new launcher also has the option to see the Google Discover feed to the left of your leftmost home screen, which in our view is a welcome addition and much more useful than the Mi Vault that used to live there. You may disagree, and the bad news is that there doesn't seem to be a way to bring the Vault back.

New Control Center, Privacy section, floating windows

One of the new things that MIUI 12 brings is having the Quick Settings separate from the notification pull-down, which is very iOS-y, and something a lot of Chinese Android skins used to do way back when but have since abandoned. It's strange to see this come back, but it is just an option and you're not forced to use it. If you do choose to enable it, you'll get notifications if you swipe down from the left, and the 'Control Center' thing if you swipe down from the right. We're not fans of it, so we left it off, but it's there if it floats your particular boat.

Control Center is opt-in

Another premiere in MIUI 12 is the revamped Privacy section in Settings, which acts as a neatly organized repository of everything that can affect your privacy - all in one place. So it's very easy to switch things up and just see at a glance what the state of your privacy is, which apps are using which permissions, that kind of thing. It doesn't necessarily give you new information that wasn't available hidden deep inside Settings menus before, but that's the point - these details are now much more easily accessible. And in a world that seems more and more concerned with privacy on devices, it's a welcome change.

New Privacy protection section

Floating windows are another heavily promoted new feature in MIUI 12, and these are probably most helpful for messaging apps. When you get a banner notification from such an app, you can 'pull it down' with your finger to open that conversation in a floating and movable window that appears above whatever else you were doing. Aside from moving, you can minimize or close these as needed. They're great for just typing a quick reply if you need to see the conversation window in full. Otherwise, you could just quick reply from the notification itself.

Floating windows explained

That said, we're still not sold on the concept of freeform windows on screens so small, not to mention the added constraint of having the keyboard show too.

Dark mode, gestures, Recents menu

MIUI 12 obviously also has a dark theme, and it's among the best out there. With this iteration of its skin, Xiaomi has also finally fixed the annoyance of having some random bits of settings not darkened - it's all dark now when you are using the dark mode. This is schedulable as you'd expect, and design-wise it's just as dark as it should be - no weird grays that are too light, nothing like that.

The dark theme can also be forced onto apps that don't yet have one of their own, and we tried this with the main Facebook app with excellent results. You might run into issues with this, creating weird colors in some apps, but thankfully this feature is entirely under your control. You can use it for one specific app as we did, all of them, or none. The dark mode also supports darkening of your wallpaper when it's on, although we're not fans of this approach, so we were happy to see that this too can be turned off.

Dark mode

The gesture navigation implementation is still one of the best out there, with back swipes done right - if you want to trigger an app's hamburger navigation drawer, swipe from the side in the top part of the screen. Otherwise, swipes from the sides trigger a Back action. By default, you get the navigation 'pill' at the bottom as Google intended, but thankfully you can turn off this needless bit of UI clutter in Settings. Unfortunately, it looks like swiping from the side and holding doesn't work anymore to get you back to the previous app quickly. This was very useful in previous MIUI iterations, and we're not sure why it's gone.

Gesture navigation settings, Recents menu

The Recents menu still sees Xiaomi do its own thing and go its own way when the entire mobile world has practically settled on having this as a horizontally scrolling list of apps. In MIUI 12, like in MIUI 11, it's a vertical list with two apps per row. Because this has been in MIUI for so long, we've gotten used to it, but still don't get why Xiaomi insists on going against the wind here. The one upside to this implementation is that you get to see a couple more app screens at a time, and thus if you want to switch to a previously used app that is further down the list, that will be ever so slightly quicker.

Ads, duplicate apps

We want to note that we're using the European build of MIUI 12, and probably because of that, we've never seen any pesky intrusive ads. Not in this build, not in any other builds on previous Xiaomi handsets we've had for long-term reviews. Sure, we see ads in some of the built-in apps, but because we find most of those redundant anyway, we choose to stick with alternatives (primarily from Google), hence we are almost never exposed to MIUI ads. That, however, may not be the case for you, depending on your region. Having annoying ads throughout the UI will make the user experience much worse, but there's not much we can do about that from here - we can't write about what that would be like, because it's simply not our experience. We will say that Xiaomi has promised, in the past, to make ads more easily removable, but we can't attest to whether that promise has been kept or not.

There are, as always in MIUI, a ton of built-in apps, and that's before you start counting the Google pre-installs. Speaking of those, the Phone app is Google's (in our region, things may differ elsewhere), which is pretty nice to see. The Messages app too. That's a nice start, Xiaomi, now maybe you can continue with trimming some of your duplicates. As a side note, a funny point is that technically Xiaomi's Phone and Messages apps weren't duplicates, because Google doesn't' mandate the installation of its Phone and Messages apps, so the search giant's simply weren't present in previous versions.

We have, many times in the past, waxed poetic about our distaste for duplicate apps, so we'll keep it short this time - maybe some of Xiaomi's own apps will work better for some people. Still, for the vast majority, they're probably better served by apps that work across Android devices, that you can easily install from the Play Store on your next phone too, even if that happens to be from another brand. This is our philosophy, and because we test so many phones, we're pretty much forced only to use phone-brand-agnostic apps that can go anywhere with us.

Updates

Our Mi 10 Pro review unit got the update to MIUI 12 while we were using it for this long-term review, and that's about it. The phone obviously ran Android 10 from day one, and the new MIUI iteration is based on the same underlying Android version.

Current software on our unit

The Mi 10 Pro will surely receive an update to Android 11 at some point, but it may be later rather than sooner, going by Xiaomi's history in this regard. Still, something needs pointing out here: unlike what happens with most other Android skins out there, new features generally arrive on Xiaomi phones with every new MIUI iteration, so the Android version update isn't that important, in terms of user-facing new stuff, compared to how things are for devices by other makers. Of course, the under-the-hood improvements are still there though.

When it comes to security updates, we feel like Xiaomi could be doing a much better job keeping its phones up to date. Those kinds of updates arrive from time to time, but it's been a while since we've seen any Xiaomi device rocking the absolute latest security patch level. So the gist of it is this: you will receive such updates, but not necessarily on a monthly cadence, and don't expect what you get to be the latest security patch level. If that's okay with you, then you'll be fine with the Mi 10 Pro.