At the 2020 Zhongguancun Forum, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun talked about MIUI among other aspects of the company’s progress in the last 10 years. The speech was part of his eulogy to the team for their efforts that has seen the company grow in leaps and bounds this past 10 years.
According to the CEO (via), the company decided to start up with software since they didn’t have much knowledge about phone hardware. The MIUI custom ROM was thus birthed. Lei Jun revealed that the MIUI ROM burst into limelight on September 20, 2010 when a developer on XDA Developers forum posted a comment drawing the attention of other members of the forum to a new ROM.
At that moment, the first version of MIUI had only 100 users after it was released in China on August 16. Surprisingly, the ROM became popular first outside China before the domestic user base started to grow.
With the official recommendation received on XDA, the idea came to translate MIUI into various languages and to adapt it to local mobile phones. This signalled the beginning of Xiaomi’s globalization. He then hinted that Xiaomi’s revenue from its international business accounts for more than half of its entire revenue and attributes it to the positive seed MIUI planted in the mind of the global audience ten years ago. However, the Xiaomi CEO did not share any data showing the firms gross revenue from the global market compared to that of China.
Currently, MIUI is in its 12th generation (MIUI 12) with millions of users spread across various regions of the world.
