[Redmi Note 11 (spes/spesn)] awaisagha:
I got my android 12 update for my RN11 a few days ago, i was on miui 13.0.15 and got this 2.9gb update which brought me to 13.0.5 and also changed the RGCMIXM to SGCMIXM.

I had some good hopes for android 12 but most of them were ruined. I will explain below what i found after a few days of usage. I must mention that i did hard reset my phone after android 12 update even though the phone was running fine but as a convention that you should do a reset, i did and the review is after this hard reset.

1. the android 12 which you might have seen in pixel phones and the one i got are totally different. This one is more of miui flavored.

2. the material you theme engine is poorly adopted. It is still 98% miui of android 11 as before, and just 2% material you.

2.1 they have saved the actual material you for android 13, as i have seen some screenshots and they have saved it for miui 14 which is also around the corner

3. the 2% material you and android 12 features are the green dots of camera/mic usage feature in status bar.

3.1 the wallpaper color accent picker is very poorly adopted. When you apply a wallpaper, it will take some time for the apps to adopt that color and right now only google apps (not all) are adopting this. Rest all the apps are still behind this. Even the google apps pick up that color after 1-2mins AND if you are a wallpaper-holic like me who like to change wallpapers twice a day, this feels quite absurd.

4. system fluidity seems ok, not much different from android 11.

5. some new animations, for example there is this gel like animation when scrolling to extreme top or bottom, It seems good but not something which is astounding.

6. battery life is almost the same as that of android 11. It's slightly lower now compared with android 11. I am a moderate user, i don't game and i always use phone in light mode (don't like the dark mode), and always 60Hz. I was getting around 9-10hrs of SOT but now i am getting almost 8-9hrs of SOT.

7. the bottom navigation bar is slight thicker than android 11, it feels a bit bad now.

8. if you were using custom fonts from theme store, they are not going to be same as on android 11. I don't know why but they felt different now.

9. The notification panel transparency is still not back.

10. charging speeds is almost the same as before, i read some comments that charging speed was effected but i didn't notice anything like this.

11. this one i felt, it might not be the case. I found the sound quality from speakers to be much better and crisp now compared to previous android 11. This might be perceptual but i thought to mention it too.

12. if you are like me who like to set everything small to get more screen resolution (i change the display size to be smallest which is hidden setting instead of being in display section) i felt that the percentage of being small in android 11 was more compared to android 12. For example if i say it was 100% small in android 11, now it is 80% small of that. I hope you can understand this.

13. i didn't find any wallpaper based colored adaptive icons. They are still the same. There is no setting to use material you based icons.

Overall it is just OK, there is no huge changes. If you want fully changed thing, then custom rom is the way to go, which i am also thinking. I previously owned a cult phone LG V20, and it came with android 7. Then it got oreo and then only Korean versions got pie update. I was lucky enought to have a Korean version and i got pie update. I felt that the upgraded systems are never the best, they always lack in something, either performance, visual changes, or minor things if you notice things very deeply. The same happened with RN11. Android 11 was much better than this. This didn't make me feel of android upgrade. If you feel happy just by getting android upgrade, then its ok, you got it but if you notice everything because it's the computer you use whole day, then i must say, the android which comes with the phone is always the best version, upgraded ones will always miss something.