Open Settings, then Apps, then “show system apps” on a Redmi Note 13, and you will find 63 entries with com.miui or com.xiaomi in the package name. Only 9 of them have icons you can tap from the home screen. The other 54 run without a launcher entry, without a name you would recognize, and without any indication of what they do. Most people scroll past them once, get overwhelmed, and never look again.
That’s the actual problem. It’s not that Xiaomi ships a lot of apps (every OEM does). It’s that the naming scheme is opaque by design, and nobody has ever handed you a way to read it. This post is that decoder.
the two tiers Xiaomi doesn’t tell you about
MIUI (and HyperOS now, its successor) splits every preinstalled app into two categories that behave completely differently.
Tier one is “system apps,” things like com.android.settings or com.miui.home (the launcher itself). These are load-bearing. Removing them without root will break your phone in ways that are hard to undo.
Tier two is “system apps that are actually just regular apps with elevated permissions,” things like com.xiaomi.mipicks (this is GetApps, the built-in app store) or com.miui.video (Mi Video). These run with system-level trust, meaning they skip some of the permission prompts a Play Store app would trigger, but functionally they’re closer to Netflix than to the Settings app. You can disable most of tier two. Xiaomi just doesn’t make that obvious, because disabling GetApps cuts off one of its ad-recommendation channels.
The trick is that both tiers use similar-looking package names, so from the outside they look equally untouchable. They’re not.
reading the package name itself
A few patterns show up constantly once you start scanning com.miui.* and com.xiaomi.* entries:
com.miui.analytics and com.miui.msa.global are telemetry and ad-serving infrastructure. MSA stands for Mi Ads (the “global” suffix means it’s the international ad SDK, distinct from the mainland China version). These two alone are responsible for a large share of the “why does my phone keep pinging Xiaomi servers” complaints people post on forums.
com.mi.android.globalminusscreen is App Vault, the swipe-left screen full of news cards and app suggestions. It reads your usage patterns to decide what to recommend, which is a nicer way of saying it profiles you.
com.miui.cleanmaster (Security app / Cleaner) is genuinely useful for storage cleanup, but it also carries its own ad module in most regions, layered on top of a tool that used to just clear cache files.
com.xiaomi.discover handles the lock screen “Glance”-style content, the rotating wallpapers and article suggestions you see when you wake the phone. This is a separate data channel from App Vault, even though they look similar to the end user.
com.miui.systemAdSolution exists on some builds as exactly what the name says: a shared ad delivery layer that other Xiaomi apps call into, rather than each app running its own ad code. This is actually more efficient from an engineering standpoint. It also means disabling one ad-serving app doesn’t necessarily stop the others.
None of this is secret. It’s documented in MIUI’s own changelogs if you dig, and in APK teardown reports from researchers. It’s just never presented to the average user as “here is what these 63 things are.”
why your region changes everything
Here’s the part that gets skipped in most explainers: the same phone model can ship a meaningfully different app set depending on where it’s sold, and this isn’t a minor variation.
The China ROM includes financial products, Mi Credit and Mi Insurance among them, that simply don’t exist on Global ROM builds. The Global ROM, sold across most of Asia, Latin America, and parts of Europe, keeps the ad SDKs but drops the financial apps. The EU-specific ROM, which Xiaomi started distributing more carefully after regulatory pressure, strips out or defaults-off several of the ad modules present in the Global build.
This isn’t theoretical. In 2021, Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Centre published a review of a Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro and found an active censorship keyword list and a data-collection ad module (referencing the same MSA framework mentioned above) bundled into the phone’s default browser and system apps. Xiaomi’s response was that the module was inactive for EU users and would be removed in future updates. Whether or not you trust that explanation, the incident is a useful data point: what ships on your phone depends heavily on where it was sold and which regulatory environment it had to survive, not just which model number is printed on the box.
If you’re comparing notes with someone who has “the same phone,” check the region code in Settings > About Phone before assuming your app lists match. They frequently don’t.
what this actually changes for you
Knowing the taxonomy doesn’t mean you delete everything. com.miui.home is your launcher; leave it. com.android.providers.telephony handles your SMS database; leave it. But com.xiaomi.mipicks, com.mi.android.globalminusscreen, and com.miui.cleanmaster’s ad layer are all fair game to disable, and disabling them (not uninstalling, since most won’t allow that without root) will measurably cut the number of ad-network calls your phone makes per day.
The broader point is that “bloatware” isn’t a single category. It’s a mix of load-bearing infrastructure, semi-optional convenience apps, and pure monetization plumbing, all wearing the same com.miui prefix so you can’t tell them apart at a glance. Once you can read the names, the decision about what to turn off stops being a guess.