EMUI vs MIUI: Here we have a Huawei Honor View 10 running on Emotion UI 8.0 more famously known as EMUI and a Xiaomi Redmi Y1 running on MIUI 9. MIUI was launched in mid-2010 and comes pre-installed with Xiaomi devices. EMUI, on the other hand, was launched in late 2012 and comes as the stock ROM for most devices manufactured by Huawei and its subsidiaries.
Both these ROMs have a very similar home screen structure where all apps are listed. However, the Emotion UI also has an option to choose from either this or a stock android like an app drawer. MIUI does not have a choice for this and there are no hopes of getting it in the future too.
You need to pinch out while on the home screen to edit it and add/remove widgets. So, the basic layout of the home screen is pretty much the same in both of them.
MIUI and Emotion UI both offer a choice to change the theme of your device. MIUI has an amazing collection of thousands of themes, fonts, and wallpapers but EMUI lacks in this department as we could only manage to use the default themes that were pre-installed and there was no option to download new themes.
Both the UI’s support modifying a theme by using components from other themes. So, you could use the wallpaper of a theme and status bar of another, Icons of a theme and fonts of another. This is a pretty cool choice to have and it is supported by both the ROMs.
Talking about the status bar and quick access settings toggles, they both seem to have a similar layout.
Wait a minute… It’s not similar… They are kind of exactly the same, aren’t they?
Anyways, so swiping to the left of the home screen opens up the Google App in our Emotion UI and the vault in MIUI. This vault not only has the google app search bar, but you can also add some more cards to quickly access information such as weather and live score. You could write a note to yourself, book a cab and whatnot. Pretty useful isn’t it. Well. Emotion UI doesn’t have it as of yet. If I am not wrong, HTC has a similar vault feature way back and Xiaomi seems to have picked it from there. So, Emotion could do the same in a future update.
Both the ROMs have their own collection of some useful preinstalled apps and there is nothing to declare here since it is just a matter of taste. MIUI surely has better apps and they were more polished than those of Emotion UI.
Now a very important feature in custom ROMs, The security app. So EMUI does give you a good platform to clear your junk to remove viruses, manage popup apps and battery settings which is all great. But the security app in MIUI is a complete feast for control freaks. If I discussed all my favorite features, I could go on and on about it.
Now moving on to the settings section, they both have a really well-organized settings section but I felt that the Emotion UI had a more compact design than MIUI and was better in grouping related settings together.
Since both the ROMs have a good number of similar features, let’s talk about features that are new and different. So, a necessity of today is the ability to be able to run two instances of the same app. This is handled by the App twin feature in Emotion UI and the Dual apps feature in MIUI. They both do the exact same job and so far, I haven’t been disappointed by either one.
The next thing I feel needs highlighting is the permissions section. Some apps can often ask for permissions that they don’t need and it wouldn’t really be safe to give them all permissions they need. Now Emotion UI has a permission manager which is very much the stock one given by android. The permission manager in MIUI, it’s just beautiful. You can prevent apps from starting automatically, see what permission apps are using individually and restrict a permission then and there itself.
An interesting implementation of the user accounts system can be seen in both the ROMs. The Emotion UI packs in the private space option, whereas MIUI has second space for the same functionality. This can really help if 2 people use the same device or if you wish to keep your personal and private data separate.
Both spaces need to have a unique password and the system automatically logs you into the space depending upon what password you entered. So, both of them do a great job at this and there is nothing to complain about.
Both the ROMs offer data sync with the cloud by using MI and Huawei accounts for MIUI and Emotion UI respectively.
Most of the security features are quite similar and they usually differ from device to device depending upon the sensors they have. Now, talking about accessibility, Both of the ROMs offer a comprehensive array of accessibility features. You have a one-handed mode which reduces the display size and fits it into a region so that it is accessible by one hand itself.
The Emotion UI has motion control gestures but again, that depends on the device to device. And When using MIUI, you have a better control over the buttons and you can create a lot of shortcuts and customize the existing ones. Emotion UI does a great job with its gestures but it is not very rich with its button shortcut.
So, which one is better EMUI or MIUI?
Both the ROMs seem to be very close to each other in terms of look and feel. However, MIUI is definitely more polished and has far more customization to offer. Talking about updates, MIUI might be a little slow in updating android versions but they still provide MIUI updates at regular intervals. EMUI version 8 currently only works on a handful of devices and the older devices haven’t been updated yet. Whereas Xiaomi always tried its best to pull its devices as much as it can. Even the lowest range of Xiaomi devices launched 2 years back are receiving updates to date. So that was it form our comparison of the Emotion UI and MIUI, do let us know which one do you prefer and why in the comment section below.