An experienced Android user will spend a countless number of hours scouring the internet looking for the best ROM to put on their device. There are plenty to choose from, certainly more than we care to name; one of the more popular ones is called MIUI. People say it’s the best attempt anyone has ever made at making Google’s mobile operating system look exactly like iOS. Xiamoi, the company that makes MIUI, even sells a phone in China with their Android ROM preinstalled. You might have never heard of Xiamoi, but there were recently valued at $4 billion. Anyway, say you want to try out MIUI, yet you don’t want to go through the hassle of rooting your device and voiding your warranty. Luckily for you, MIUI is now available as a launcher called “MiHome”. It’s compatible with Android 2.3 and Android 4.0 devices, and best of all it’s free.
The bigger and more important question here is why do custom launchers like this even exist? You could argue that HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and other companies, did Google a favor by adding functionality to earlier versions of Android. Times have changed though. Google now has designers. Stock Android is not only feature complete for all intents and purposes, but it’s also more efficient when compared to Sense, MotoBLUR, TouchWIZ, and whatever other brand name that was created to describe an Android skin.
We understand that some of you have grown used to using the Android skin that your hardware maker of choice has made, but given a choice between a skinned version of Android or an up-to-date version of Android, which would you choose? That’s an easy question to answer if you know what sort of goodies come with software updates.
The masses however, someone needs to have a chat with them and explain everything.