Xiaomi’s MIUI is a heavily customized Android skin which is used in several Xiaomi devices. MIUI was started way back in 2010, and since then it has continued to provide Global Beta builds for almost all its smartphones. But in a recent announcement on Mi Community, it was confirmed that things are now going to change. In the post, Xiaomi has announced the end of MIUI Global Beta ROM for all its devices.
One of the Admin members on Mi Community, Elaine2046 announced that the team of engineers would cease to release global MIUI Global Beta builds for all the Xiaomi devices. This would be effective, starting from July 1 of 2019.
MIUI typically had two versions of its software: MIUI Stable and MIUI Beta. The Stable release was meant to be for public use or let’s say that was the final release of the software without bugs. On the other hand, the Beta build was meant to be the test build for fans and developers which can typically have bugs. Xiaomi also used to test the new features in this build before releasing it publicly.
The Mi Teams says that several Global Beta users have been using these beta builds as daily build, and the team doesn’t intend them to be used that way. Also, they added that the MIUI engineers want to focus more on perfecting the stable releases of devices in their portfolio rather than maintaining the Beta Builds.
I don’t understand how this would help them benefit on focusing the Stable Releases as due to lesser testing, it might result into having more bugs than it usually did. Sure, the Beta Testing might still continue for the Chinese version of MIUI. But it can’t account for several classes of users globally.
Well, there might be some Internal Closed Beta testing as well, but Open Beta was a great platform to gather feedback from a great number of users around the world. The post on Mi Community still says that they’ll continue to gather feedback from several platforms, but I wonder how extensive that can be when compared to the Open Beta releases.
