Video: Xiaomi's Mi 6 with MIUI 9 beats Samsung's Galaxy S8 in performance

When Xiaomi unveiled its latest proprietary software — MIUI 9 — last week, they promised faster app opening times than MIUI 8 and possibly other operating systems. Generally, these claims are ignored as everybody claims their new product or service to be faster than the previous version but ends up providing an almost experience to the old one. However, Xiaomi intended to prove that its claims are actually true, which is why they did a performance test in front of the camera.

The video shows MIUI 9 on their flagship Mi 6 smartphone competing with Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S8 and Huawei’s P10 smartphone. All the three smartphones run a custom version of Android and have a lot of tweaking underneath. The test was conducted using a professional setup that utilised a robotic arm simulating user inputs from the real world.

The Mi 6 with MIUI 9 managed to beat the Galaxy S8 and the P10 in a majority of apps being opened simultaneously. Out of 50 popular apps, MIUI 9 managed to beat the other two in app opening times for 43 apps. In contrast, the comparatively expensive Galaxy S8 managed to beat MIUI 9 in four apps, which is not something that S8 owners will like to know.

Although the test utilises MIUI 9’s China ROM on a phone primarily available in China, it shows that Xiaomi’s custom software has a lot of tweaking under the hood to optimise the software for utilising the potent hardware. Xiaomi is yet to reveal its Global MIUI 9 ROM, which will be supporting other carriers along with Google’s suite of apps. Once that rolls out, it will be interesting to see a test between MIUI 9 and Google’s stock Android 7.1 Nougat. It will also be interesting to see whether Xiaomi can port MIUI 9’s agility on the Mi 6 flagship to its mid-range handsets like the Redmi Note 4 and Redmi 4.