Next Major Update to MIUI to Bring Split Screen and Picture-in-Picture

There have been a lot of rumors circulating about the upcoming Mi 6 from Xiaomi lately. The company recently announced they would be unveiling the device on April 19th, but that wasn’t the only announcement they made recently. The company is planning for a big update to MIUI in the near future that would bring two highly-requested features to the ROM. These features both pertain to multi-tasking and one of them is slated to be included in the core Android O release too.

Firstly we have the addition of a Split Screen feature that will let you use two different applications on the screen at the same time. Some OEMs such as LG and Samsung have had this feature in their version of Android for quite a while now. Google recently introduced it into the base version of Android and it has been improving over time. The screenshots showing this feature on MIUI look exactly like the way Google has implemented it, so they are likely utilizing that code for this feature.

The second new feature that was announced and shown off is a new Picture-in-Picture mode. This will enable you to shrink a full screen application (like for video) to a small size and then drag it around on the screen. Google introduced a PiP mode for Android TV recently, and will be expanding this to all Android devices with the upcoming Android O update. It’s unclear if this feature was developed solely in-house, or if Xiaomi is using some of Google’s code for this one as well.

Xiaomi didn’t reveal exactly what update these two features will be included in, but did say it would be coming in an upcoming major MIUI update. The company was also sure to point out that every application would not be compatible with these features out of the gate, stating that developers will need to make their applications compatible with these two features in order for the to work on MIUI devices. This is the same issue Samsung’s and LG’s systems had in the end, as most applications couldn’t natively use the feature, while the stock Nougat implementation is a lot more flexible.

Source: GizmoChina

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