The Indian smartphone market was taken by storm when Xiaomi announced the Mi A1 last year. Being the company’s first Android One smartphone, it provided a great combination of Xiaomi’s impeccable build quality and a clean, bloat-free Android experience at an affordable price range. While the Mi A1 was doing good numbers for Xiaomi, the company has fallen behind when it comes to a timely rollout of updates. The Mi A1 is still stuck on Android 8.0 Oreo, which when compared to the other Android One devices in the same price range, is simply unimpressive. However, Xiaomi might change that very soon.
Fonearena reports that Xiaomi has started testing the Android 8.1 Oreo build. Mi A1 users, who are registered as closed beta testers, have been reportedly receiving the beta build of Android 8.1 Oreo. Being an Android One ROM, the update is expected to bring all the usual Oreo 8.1 goodies such as refined notifications, minor UI refinements and Google neural network APIs. The update has also been noticed to include the June 2018 security patch. However, it has already discovered that Xiaomi isn’t including support for Treble, the absence of which indicates slow update rollout.
It has been noticed that Xiaomi has been struggling with the Mi A1 over the past few months. The device has been out of stock for the past few months and Xiaomi hasn’t mentioned when the device will be brought back to the shelves. Additionally, users have been observing delayed security patches.
With Google preparing Android P for a public release pretty soon, it remains to be seen whether Xiaomi can cope up and fulfil its promise of rolling out Android P to the device after it debuts on Google’s Pixel devices. The Mi A1 already faces stiff competition from the ASUS Zenfone Max Pro M1 and the Nokia 6.1, with the latter being an Android One device and delivering timely updates.
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