Dangling a long-anticipated update in front of smartphone users is comparable to the age old carrot-and-stick story, but that’s the absolutely true situation these days. The phone makers ‘accidentally’ leaked the teaser of a new feature, or even misplaced a piece of testing software in the wild.

project_x_realme_3_pro_w.76_about_device
An alleged copy of Project X build for Realme 3 Pro got leaked some days ago

Last week the whole Xiaomi community experienced a similar phenomenon. The Chinese units of Mi MIX 2S, Mi 8 and Mi 9 started to get MIUI 11 tagged beta builds, although that was a mere cosmetic change from the Chinese OEM.

Although the OTA prompt revealed the new logo of the eleventh interaction of MIUI, the set of builds were internally based on MIUI 10. The fact could be easily validated by examining the internal system components.

mi_mix_2s_miui_11_9.9.3_ota
MIUI 11 (superficial) weekly OTA prompt on Mi MIX 2S

I presume Xiaomi needs to improve the security perimeter around the big red button in their OTA delivery center, as another set of MIUI 11 based software updates randomly appeared a few hours ago. The OEM instantly shut down the rollout, but we now have plenty of fascinating information.

First of all, the ‘accident’ happened on Redmi K20 Pro, Mi MIX 2S, Mi 6 and Mi Note 3 units in China. The changelog did mention ‘MIUI 11’ in it, which is a significant change.

miui_11_9.9.9_china_beta_ota_prompt

After translating the Chinese text, we know that these builds are targeted towards a special group of users (alpha testers perhaps) thus they are protected with watermarks. You can find the IMEI and the Mi account ID all over the places in the UI after installing this particular update on your phone.

miui_11_9.9.9_china_beta_about_watermark
Notice the MIUI 11 logo (watermarks are masked to protect anonymity)

We are not sure whether the watermarking is part of the whole MIUI 11 development builds or only today’s compilations, but it can be dangerous for the alpha/beta testers. Always erase those identifiers before sharing the images, otherwise Xiaomi will kick you out from the testing team.

The layer of MIUI is certainly upgraded to 11 in these builds, as we confirm it by checking the build.prop.

ro.miui.ui.version.name=V11

Thanks to our collaboration with yshalsager and the Xiaomi Firmware Updater project, you can download these mysterious MIUI 11 update packages using the following links:

  • Device: Redmi K20 Pro
  • Codename: raphael
  • Channel: China Beta (Closed)
  • Version: 9.9.9
  • Android: 10
    • Type: Recovery
      • Download: Link
      • MD5:
redmi_k20_pro_miui_9.8.8_china_ota
Redmi K20 Pro received Android 10 last month via MIUI China beta
  • Device: Mi MIX 2S
  • Codename: polaris
  • Channel: China Beta (Closed)
  • Version: 9.9.9
  • Android: 9.0
    • Type: Recovery
      • Download: Link
      • MD5:
  • Device: Mi 6
  • Codename: sagit
  • Channel: China Beta (Closed)
  • Version: 9.9.9
  • Android: 9.0
    • Type: Recovery
      • Download: Link
      • MD5:

Hurry up! Xiaomi might take down these packages anytime!

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Kingshuk De
896 Posts

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.

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