UPDATE: Xiaomi has confirmed that it is rolling out Android Pie to Poco F1. Xiaomi Global Spokesperson Donovan Sung formally announced the Android Pie update for the Poco F1 on Twitter.
The new update, just like the beta, does not add features such as Digital Wellbeing and Adaptive Battery, presumably because Xiaomi prefers working on its own AI than leveraging Google’s. Moreover, there’s no change in terms of the UI, which is again something that Xiaomi does not have a practice of doing, as it instead focuses on refashioning its own MIUI, which already happened with MIUI 10.
Gladly, notifications work well and the improvement is really useful. Every time you unlock the screen, notification icons appear and then roll back, emptying the space for the clock and I’ve come to like this a lot. In fact, using the hybrid floating notifications is better than persistent ones because it makes the status bar appear uncluttered.
The over-the-air (OTA) update will be available in a phased roll-out and might take weeks before it reaches you. To check for the OTA, you can go to Settings, followed by top-most option About Phone, and then System Update. Now tap on “Check for Updates”.
The installation process would take 15-20 minutes and make sure your Poco F1 is either connected to the charger or has ample battery to endure through the update. Once the process is complete, your device will reboot and update some Google Play Libraries to support Android Pie.
While I feel that the animations are slightly zippier, I’ll be testing how Android Pie performs on Poco F1 over the next few coming days. With this update, we also hope that Poco has fixed the battery drain issue which many users had been complaining of after the MIUI 10 update.
