Index page

Tips & tricks

Before purchasing

• If you live outside of Xiaomi’s official market, you have to purchase from third-party resellers who are sometimes more expensive, less reliable and don’t provide as much aftersales as Xiaomi officially would. The list of recommended resellers can be found here.

• Do not buy a Chinese Version phone, even if it comes with the Global ROM pre-installed. Chinese Versions are made for the Chinese market and they primarily support Chinese networks so you probably won’t get full network coverage in your country. Most models have Global Versions however, which support additional LTE bands, giving you better or even full network coverage. Moreover, it’s not possible to boot Global MIUI on locked Chinese Versions and Global MIUI requires a locked bootloader to pass SafetyNet and get Google Play certification. Finally, Xiaomi rarely releases Global ROMs for devices only marketed in Mainland China and Chinese ROMs are difficult to set up and use outside of China, so if you want a Global ROM, wait for the Global Version to come out.

• If you purchase a Chinese device with MIUI from a reseller, it might come with a reseller ROM if there’s no official Global ROM available for it at the time of purchase. These ROMs are badly optimised, buggy, not safe to use and often bloated. If you encounter a reseller ROM, you have to get rid of it by yourself. Learn more about reseller ROMs here.

• Xiaomi does not provide customer support or warranty for unofficially purchased products. Many of their products are exclusive to Mainland China and only get support there. Keep that in mind when you purchase from a third-party. If you encounter an issue, the best you can do is ask for help online, on the official MIUI forums, on the Xiaomi.eu or the XDA forums.

• If you are interested in modding (flashing/rooting) your device, do not get a MediaTek-based device. MediaTek tends to not release sources for their hardware so custom development is quite limited for MediaTek devices.

After purchasing

• During the first time setup, it’s recommended to create a Mi account but there’s no need to use Xiaomi’s own services, such as Find my device or MiCloud. The former makes it difficult to untie your device from your Mi account in case you want to reset it or sell it while the latter is simply inferior to Google Drive.

• MIUI comes with plenty of pre-installed apps that many users see as bloatware. Some of them can be easily uninstalled but most can’t. If you’d like to get rid of such apps, look into my uninstalling guide.

• Apps are often killed in the background by MIUI to prolong battery life and as a result you might not receive all your notifications by default. To fix that, change these settings.