A few days ago, Lei Jun held a "high-end strategy seminar" within Xiaomi.
It is mentioned that Xiaomi should formally set up a high-end strategy working group to make efforts to win the first place in the domestic high-end mobile phone market share within three years.
Let's take this as a slogan or flag for the time being, after all, trees do not have roots and do not grow, and people have no ambition.
The high-end is not a brainless stack can be achieved, it requires brand recognition, product strength, quality control, system stability and technical barriers to complement each other.
So the question is, what conditions do the current Xiaomi mobile phones meet?
Brother Understand subjectively believes that in terms of brand recognition and product strength, Xiaomi meets the conditions.
Through the "Redmi cost performance + millet to take the high-end" dual route to attack the city, Millet won the world's second market share.
Not to mention the product strength, Xiaomi stacking material is an ancestral strength, and the success of the Xiaomi 10 Supreme Commemorative Edition is a good example.
At this time, some small partners may ask, Xiaomi is not even self-developed chips, what are its technical barriers or technical selling points?
You may not believe it, MIUI is the biggest "technical barrier" that Xiaomi has ever had.
As the earliest Android deep customization UI in China, MIUI has won the love of many geeks with its smooth, humanized and multi-functional characteristics.
As for what happened later, everyone should know that the stability of MIUI 12 has become poor after the release.
This also laid a solid foundation for the emergence of the "Xiaomi Bible" later, until the release of MIUI 13, the system experience has been greatly improved.
At least Xiao Lei experienced it himself, and there were no more outrageous bugs.
But looking back, Jin Fan drew a lot of cakes in the MIUI 12 conference, and until now he has not cashed in.
Today we will take a good look at this matter.
"Shoulder to shoulder" iOS animation
Animation is not an indispensable thing in mobile phones, but it is undeniable that the system animation can improve the user's experience.
The addition of various animations has made the ordinary "hand rubbing glass" an interactive behavior.
Our witty MIUI also thinks so, so the development team worked overtime and developed a set of dynamic effect architecture, officially named "Mi Yu Light Cone Dynamic Effect Architecture".
Things like real-time blur, dynamic fillets, and application interrupt animations are all arranged for us.
Good guys, isn't this properly comparable to iOS?
The press conference PPT looks very beautiful, but the actual experience is really unsatisfactory.
Not to mention comparable to iOS, even the basic frame is not dropped is difficult to guarantee.
Open the application to drop the frame, switch the application also drop the frame, this problem is like a shadow, it is simply a nightmare of the high-brush model.
Many users even think that it is this set of fancy animation engines that drag down the stability of MIUI.
Starting from the MIUI 12.5 period, when Xiao Lei first upgraded, he could really feel the comfort brought by the animation everywhere.
Interrupting the animation is very emotional, so that the system really has a complete animation transition interaction.
Many of the first users to upgrade MIUI 12.5 also said that the upgrade is much smoother, the animation is more silky, and the Gaussian blur brings an unprecedented sense of premium.
But well, this perfect animation is all sacrificed for the fluency of the system.
Brother Yi deliberately spent half a day to experience the MIUI 12.5 stable version and MIUI 13 development version.
It is obvious that MIUI 12.5 drops frames more frequently, and opening and switching apps is not as smooth as MIUI 13.
In the end, between beautiful animation and stability, MIUI 13 chose the latter.
Yes, careful MIUI users should have noticed that MIUI 13 has a lot of animated details that have been castrated.
For example, the complete interrupt animation that was blown up to the ceiling on MIUI 12 is now devoid of its former glory.
A quick interruption will cause the desktop to flash back, and the screen is inexplicably ghostly.
But this is definitely a good thing, the system has always been stability first, and any animation animation is the icing on the cake.
However, MIUI drew an animation pie that is "comparable to iOS", and now it is a knife to cut back, and users are estimated to be unhappy.
Icon those "cakes"
App icons are design matters, and most users will not actively pay attention to their changes.
But the witty brother found that in the icon piece, Xiao Fan also drew cakes for us.
Since MIUI 12, the system desktop has added a new feature - [Perfect Icon], which you can find in your desktop settings.
The biggest effect of this feature is to remove the icon psoriasis ads.
Like this app icon with advertising attributes, it is a typical psoriasis icon, and the ads have reached the icon, pure and disgusting users.
On MIUI 12.5, as long as the [Perfect Icon] function is enabled, the psoriasis icons of those mainstream apps will be redrawn and killed.
But when it came to MIUI 13, the [Perfect Icon] function suddenly failed, and it was not clear whether it was a Bug or an official castration.
Icon features that have appeared since MIUI 12, as well as [Layered Dynamic Icons].
When we exit the app, the app icon changes dynamically.
For example, the [Xiaomi Community] icon under the default theme dynamically changes with the withdrawal of the application.
Similarly, there is the [Settings] icon, exit from the open state, and the small gear of the icon will rotate slightly.
Some small partners may ask, this function is not no problem, it is indeed a hierarchical dynamic icon.
Yes, but do you remember that the MIUI 12 launch also mentioned a new theme called "Exploration"?
The icon style is simple and unified, the recognition is also very high, and the official also said that it will adapt to the layered dynamic icon.
But Xiao Lei also tested a wave when writing the article, and found that the icon did not have layered and dynamic effects...
Whether this is a picture cake or a bug of MIUI 13, we dare not say, nor dare to ask.
And these...
In addition to the above obviously perceived functional castration, there are also many functions of "painting cakes are very beautiful, and reality is punched in the face" that are worth mentioning.
Take super wallpaper, for example, when this feature appeared at the conference, it made Xiao Lei feel amazing.
The transition of wallpaper from lock screen to desktop is as silky as Dove, coupled with picturesque earth and Martian wallpapers, a proper design aesthetic model.
However, the freshness of the initial experience is quickly diluted by time, leaving only the user's extreme sensitivity to the degree of power consumption.
I don't know if the official noticed the user's feedback, and the follow-up maintenance of the super wallpaper is not very concerned.
Specifically, Jin Fan once showed marine wallpaper at the MIUI 12.5 conference.
But we waited until 2022, or did not wait for the endless ocean.
Weather wallpapers, not to mention, were once launched on MIUI 12.5, and many users have experienced it for a while.
However, after upgrading to MIUI 13, the weather wallpaper was cut off again, which made old users itch.
There is also a function that is more miserable, and it is estimated that many small partners have forgotten its existence.
It is the "small window capsule" that was once highly expected, and its main functions are two:
When the app is in a mini window, the app is prompted for key information apps
When running in the background, it automatically prompts important in-app information in the form of mini windows
It sounds very practical, but because there were too few suitable applications at that time, the application scenarios were naturally pitiful.
So more than a year later, has there been more adaptation applications?
Obviously not, it's really no different from when it was first launched.
There are nearly 200 apps installed in the brother's mobile phone, and the co-adaptation list is not even on the list?
Users forgot to have this matter, the official is too lazy to manage, this function is currently in a state of stocking and rotting...
There are also many large and small functions, due to various reasons can not be perfected, understand the brother will not give examples.
At last
From the above "paint cake" functions, we can also get a glimpse of how much the MIUI development team struggled to make MIUI 12.
Many features were touted before the release, pulling the user's expectations to the ceiling, but the experience was very poor after the real implementation of the system.
In this case, the official itself is also a bit of a repeated jump, some functions are directly castrated, for users who do not use the frequency is not high, they are directly ignored.
It's like feeding the cake into the user's mouth, the user chews a bite and feels that it is not delicious, and the official forcibly takes the cake back, who can stand it.
In the final analysis, it is caused by the official over-focus on user feedback.
MiUI 13 is now the right choice to make the system more stable by emasculating all sorts of small details and optimizing the underlying code.
After all, for the vast majority of users, stability is the most important.
However, I still hope that MIUI can be more firm, rather than launching a function, and directly cutting it if it is found to be unstable or bad feedback.
This is a real harm to users and MIUI accumulated over the years, which is a real harm to the fist to the flesh...