Mi3 owners, your update is nigh
Xiaomi has just launched the Redmi Note 4G in India, and tech site The Next Web had a little one-on-one with the ex-Googler and current VP for Global of Xiaomi, Hugo Barra. It seems that Hugo hasn’t forgotten about Mi users as far as Google’s latest update is concerned, and has promised that its Mi line of devices will be getting the update in Q1 of next year.
“Upgrading to Lollipop is my #1 priority from a product perspective for our global business. As you know, we customize Android significantly and have our own design language — so what we’re tasked with now is not only all the technical aspects of putting Android 5.0 on our devices, like at the kernel level, but we also have to marry Google’s Material Design language with ours,” he says during the interview.
“We want the best of both worlds for our customers. That’s in full swing at the moment, and you can expect MIUI 6 along with Android 5.0 on our Mi line of devices by the end of Q1 2015. That update will come to our Redmi devices too, but we don’t yet have an exact timeline just yet,” he adds.
Along with talks about the Lollipop update, Hugo also expressed interest in being included in the Android One initiative of Google, though he did not announce when this would happen. It would also be interesting to see how exactly Xiaomi will reconcile Android One with their software philosopy – Xiaomi did come to being because of MIUI, and it’ll be a little weird to see a Xiaomi handset without their iconic UI layered on top.
