How are these industry-leading policies when Fairphone, a much smaller company, is promising 5 android updates and 8 years of security updates? And it's not like Fairphone doesn't have a good track record AFAIK.
Fairphone is a leader in long time support, but it is a very very small and niche brand.
And, to be fair, they offered this for single model only so far. Track record is mixed: I saw people complain that Fairphone is very late with their updates.
Tbf the Fairphone 5 uses a SoC that is specifically chosen for longer support.
I've got zero expectations, they made POCO F3 and F4 with same SoC but F3 is EOL, and F4 still gets updates.
Considering they neglected it in ideal conditions, how can we believe them to support less convergent set of devices?
Anyway, anyone can tell me why should we care about Android updates except for security? I'm totally bored by Android 14, not even one interesting thing in release notes. Maybe taking sharing menu out of OEM hands and updating it through Play Store, but seeing how they did something like that in Chrome makes it rather intrusive feature.
MIUI is even more boring, from MIUI 11 to 14 on POCO F3 I have noticed no changes in the skin, they added widgets for China-only but these see useful, just nice to look at. I love widgets, but c'mon.
Would only buy a Xiaomi as a daily driver if MIUI Global isn't actually just bloatware and adware.
redmi note 9 pro user here. Now on LOS. The default OS is full of telemetry. Even the calculator wants you to agree to personal data being used. Would avoid unless you only want the hardware and the model you want has active community rom support.
Also the Bootloader unlocking process is a PITA. You need a xiaomi account logged in to the phone for it for 2 weeks, then they may allow unlocking the BL but only through their unlocker app that frankly sucks. You may have to sit through the wait period twice if something goes wrong. Ask me how I know.
To addon, it straight up refuses to work on AMD PCs, so I had to painstakingly borrow an Intel machine to completely free my Poco F1 from the shackles of Xiaomi.
Good. If they bring this policy to the rest of the lineup. It will put pressure on other OEMs to provide similar support.
They need to stop making so many variations of the same phone and launching it in same series and then in their spinoff brands.
So they will do like in the past? Before (until around mi6) they supported phones for years, now they EOL them a week after the launch the new toy the following week