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Originally Posted by phamilyman Completely disagree.
I personally think the latest and greatest Android OS is irrelevant today. What matters is responsiveness and day to day lag-free nature.
Almost 20 of my extended family have different Mi devices. Unlike even the OPO (which started hanging of late), none has upgraded due to crappy performance.
On the other hand my S3 lags terribly even with CM10.3 (Android 4.3). I cant wait to buy RN3 and throw away my S3.
MIUI is not the motorola-like approach but it has quite some satisfied users. I want simple reliability and usability, not numerically latest OS. |
To each his own. Cutting edge software might not be an absolute necessity today, but
only for a basic usage pattern. A power user would tend to find an outdated OS seriously inadequate.
Still, a new Android version does manage to bring a lot of improvements well worth upgrading to. Android N is bringing universal split screen multitasking for example. And Marshmallow brought doze, app permissions and now on tap. Earlier, Jellybean brought in Google Now.
Now one may argue that they find their battery life adequate and don't need doze, or is okay with giving all permissions to their apps or that they don't use Google now at all. But then it is highly likely to be a light user with such a usage pattern.
Today AOSP itself has enough features not to need any custom skin on top at all. And stock Android as an ecosystem is a beautifully intuituve and more importantly cohesive exprience throughout. And due to material design, it has become only better and even more so with third party apps.
On the other hand, the custom skins lack consistency in their own design and feel like a mishmash of sorts. Besides, most popular third party apps have material design now, and these iOS inspired Chinese skins don't gel with material at all. Now if you use your phone just for calling, emails, camera and IM's you may not even notice it, or choose to ignore it despite noticing it. But with a power user usage, it is more than evident more and more you use the phone. I was myself a big Touchwiz fan and AOSP hater in the ICS-Jellybean days, but since Kitkat, AOSP has become so good I rooted my tablet to go AOSP.
Also, custom skins slow down updates, hence getting security updates is a pain. Nexus devices get security updates straight from Google every month. Some like Samsung and HTC have also adopted these monthly updates, but due to OEM's and carriers (abroad), I won't be surprised if a February security patch doesn't make it to half the phones through March.
Also, I agree custom skins have a lot of features stock Android may not have at that point, but it is equally true that most of these features are half-baked and mostly come across as gimmicks. When Google implement them in AOSP, the implementation is far sleeker and far more widespread. Samsung and LG had multi-window for a long time, but those had weird multi-window interfaces, and supported very very few apps. Now that Google has baked it into AOSP, it is executed fantastically, and almost all apps will support it. Similarly, we have had umpteen 'battery saving modes', 'stamina modes', etc. in custom skins for a long time. None have worked as good as doze.
As for MIUI specifically, yes they have the features that stock Android does, but these features are there because they are in iOS as well, and thus you'll have to thank Apple for them. They won't be expected to take the effort of bringing a feature present in AOSP but absent in iOS promptly to MIUI.
As for the Redmi Note 3, I totally agree it is by far the best phone in its price range. No doubt about that. But it's not for everyone. Not for me, for example, despite MIUI being ages and ages better since the Mi3 days. And the interesting part will be to see how reliability, service, availability and quality control hold up.