Xiaomi’s MIUI 9 to steal another major iOS feature

The current beta build of MIUI 9 brings gesture-based navigation from the iPhone X.

If we are to convey our honest opinion about Xiaomi, the company takes a lot of inspiration from Apple products for its entire product lineup. Right from the MacBook ‘inspired’ Mi Notebook to the iPad ‘inspired’ Mi Pad to the iOS ‘inspired’ MIUI, every product and service in Xiaomi’s lineup smells ‘so-Apple’. If you adore this idea, then good news for you — Xiaomi is again taking inspiration for its next MIUI 9 update, this time from their flagship iPhone X.

The latest beta build for MIUI 9 brings iPhone-X-like gesture-based navigation for selected Xiaomi smartphones, namely the Mi MIX, MI MIX 2, Redmi 5 and Redmi 5 Plus models. If you are a Mi fan, then you will notice that all the devices mentioned here sport an 18:9 display with no physical buttons on the front. The gestures include swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the home screen, swiping from the bottom and then holding for one second to open up the Recents tab, and swiping left or right from the screen to the middle to switch between apps.

All of these gestures are currently present on the iPhone X. However, it will be interesting to see how Xiaomi manages to integrate these gesture-based control on Android, a platform that natively supports navigation through software-based buttons at the bottom. Will the new gestures require app developers to adapt their apps accordingly for MIUI 9-powered handsets? Will it work as flawlessly as iOS? We will have to wait for until the stable ROM rolls out to find out.