Fixing aggressive Xiaomi battery management
I've been using a Xiaomi phone recently, running Xiaomi HyperOS 1.011.0, and one feature that bugs me constantly is that apps lose state as soon as you flip away to another app, even if only for a second; once you flip back, the app restarts. This appears to be an aspect of Xiaomi's built in power management. I've been searching for a way to disable it, and allow multiple apps in memory simultaneously, and I've finally tracked it down. As described here, https://piunikaweb.com/2021/04/19/miui-optimization-missing-in-developer-options-try-this-workaround/ , you need to enable Developer Mode on the phone, enter "Additional Settings" / "Developer options", then scroll all the way down, nearly to the bottom, to "Reset to default values". Hit this _repeatedly_ (once is not enough!) until another option appears just below, called either "Turn on MIUI optimisation" or, in my case, "Turn on system optimisation"; this is enabled by default. Turn it off. In my case, this has fixed the flipping-between-apps problem, the phone in general is significantly snappier to respond, and WhatsApp and Telegram new-message notifications don't get auto-dismissed (which was another annoying feature previously). I suspect a load of battery optimisations and CPU throttling has been disabled. It remains to be seen what this does to my battery life, but hopefully it'll be worth it, and it'll be nice not to lose state in Chrome forms when I have to flip over to my banking app, etc. I won't be getting another Xiaomi phone after this; there are numerous rough edges and outright bugs in the MIUI/HyperOS platform, at least in the international ROM images, and there's no support or documentation to work around this stuff. It's a crappy user experience.
(tags: phones mobile xiaomi miui workarounds battery options settings)