Redmi 6/6A Android Pie 9.0 update begins rolling out as beta
Qualcomm and their Snapdragon lineup of SoCs are household names, even for regular Android users. Major smartphone makers often choose the platform built by the US based chipset vendor, especially for the flagships.
The 5G variant of Galaxy S10 (US) is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC & Snapdragon X50 5G modem
If you look at the current smartphone (and tablet) portfolio of Xiaomi – one of the largest Android OEM – the absolute dominance of Qualcomm can easily be noticed. Right from the flagships to entry level phones, Snapdragon chips are everywhere.
Similar to Samsung or Huawei, Xiaomi tried to develop their in-house chip. Dubbed as ‘Pinecone’, the first iteration with these SoCs (Surge S1) was used in 2017’s Mi 5C.
Mi 5c
Although the Chinese OEM used Intel and NVIDIA based chipsets in their devices, the second popular platform for them should be MediaTek. They used to release China specific editions of a number of phones with MediaTek chipset inside.
However, the track record of software updates was literally horrible for the MediaTel models. For example, the Snapdragon variant Redmi Note 4 (codename: mido) got official update from Marshmallow to Nougat, while unofficially it got Android Pie as well.
Redmi Note 4
On the other hand, the MediaTek variant of the same phone (codename: nickel) was stuck at Marshmallow. As a consequence, people were rather sceptical when Xiaomi launched Redmi 6A and 6 in India last year with MediaTek chipset on board.
In one of our previous articles, we highlighted the update scenario of the phone duo. As a matter of fact, both of the phones were entitled to get Android Pie update and a pre-release Pie based developer ROM was leaked as well.
Redmi 6
Xiaomi has started a public beta testing initiative, and they are looking for volunteers to test the Android Pie based MIUI 10 before wider rollout. Now that the global beta channel has ended, there is no other way to recruit testers.
Now there is catch! The Chinese public beta channel is still active and the first Pie based MIUI update for Redmi 6A and Redmi 6 are now rolling out in China.
Besides updating the base Android version, Xiaomi engineers also included July security patches in the update. Redmi 6/6A users now get the taste of shake gestures to arrange the icons and faster (up to 30%) boot up speed.
Oh yes, and there is dark mode toggle as well!
The download links of the full update packages can be found below. As always, I like to thank yshalsager and the Xiaomi Firmware Updater project for tracking the URLs.
- Device: Redmi 6A
- Codename: cactus
- Channel: China Beta
- Version: 9.7.4
- Android: 9.0
- Device: Redmi 6
- Codename: cereus
- Channel: China Beta
- Version: 9.7.4
- Android: 9.0
Planning to install Android Pie on Indian Redmi 6/6A? You should unlock the bootloader and flash the fastboot package.
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