Xiaomi maintains its custom skin of Android, called MIUI, which ships on most of the company's devices — the main exceptions being its Android One and Android Go phones. Xiaomi allows phone owners to try out new MIUI features in the public MIUI Beta program, but now that's coming to an end.

"As more Mi Phone models got introduced to the market, more users started using MIUI Beta through different channels," Xiaomi wrote in a post on the official Mi Community forum. "However, MIUI Beta is made for public testing and requires the user to have a very high tolerance for bugs and faults. [...] Our team of engineers has decided to stop releasing the global version of MIUI Beta for all devices starting July 1st, 2019."

The post explains that the public beta program was being used by a large audience, most of which never reported bugs back to the development team. The vast amount of phones Xiaomi has released over the years likely multiplied the problem of two OS branches being developed simultaneously.

The forum thread already has 18 pages of replies, with many phone owners upset over the discontinuation. Some claim that the beta branch was more stable than MIUI Stable, while others say their feedback and bug reports always fell on deaf ears.

It's not currently clear if existing beta users will be transitioned to MIUI Stable, or if they'll be left on the most recent update until they switch back themselves. The post also didn't mention if MIUI Stable will start being updated on a monthly schedule, as MIUI Beta was.

Source: Mi Community

Via: XDA Developers