Android 11 arrives on Xiaomi Mi A3 but suffers from major issues

The official Android 11 update is now rolling out for the Xiaomi Mi A3 but, as we saw with the Android 10 rollout last year, it’s not without some pretty sizeable issues.

For those unaware, the original rollout of Android 10 for the Xiaomi Mi A2 and A3 was fraught with danger as many people received mistaken Mexican firmware updates or encountered problems ranging from bricked devices to power issues. The update was pulled three times earlier in 2020, which is, frankly, a joke for such a lightweight update to a device running Android One.

The OTA update is a sizeable one — as you’d expect — at around 1.4GB. It brings with it all of the Android 11 features that we’ve come to know and love including enhanced privacy controls, conversation bubbles, improved Do Not Disturb mode plus much more:

Annoyingly, that trend has continued with the Android 11 update for the Xiaomi Mi A3 — although it doesn’t yet look like the update has been pulled at the time of publishing this piece. Some people are complaining over on Twitter that the update has bricked their Mi A3 handsets (via XDA).

Now while we applaud the fact that such an affordable Android device is getting updated to Android 11, you would hope that issues like this would have been resolved before the trigger was pulled on the actual rollout process. Given that problems arose with the Android 10 rollout, Xiaomi should really have ensured their Android 11 update for the Mi A3 was effectively bulletproof before even thinking about sending it out to users.

Because of the inherent risks and problems with the Android 11 update for those with the Xiaomi Mi A3, we’d say that it might be worthwhile disabling automatic updates within Developer Options on your device and just holding out a little longer to see if fixes are pushed. If you are an intrepid Mi A3 owner, you can still install the update by heading to Settings > System > System updates > Check for update. We do strongly advise against doing so in this instance.

• Samsung has updated these phones to Android 11
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• [Update: Global] Android 11 update rolling out to Galaxy Note 20 series