Set Up an App Timer
If an app on your Xiaomi phone keeps eating hours of your day without you noticing, MIUI does not limit it automatically. Digital Wellbeing only tracks usage in the background unless you configure a timer yourself for that app. Without that timer, games or social media apps stay open all day, no matter how long you actually meant to use them.
Go Back to Previous App Gesture
If swiping in from the left edge and holding for a moment does nothing on your Xiaomi phone, the Go back to previous app gesture is probably switched off. This shortcut only shows up once full-screen gestures are active, and it needs its own toggle buried inside the gesture settings. Without it, the small app-icon preview at the screen edge never appears.
Reset App Settings
If notifications suddenly stop showing up or a default app keeps opening files the wrong way on your Xiaomi phone, a leftover app preference is often the cause. Resetting app settings clears these overrides without touching your saved app data or files. It is the quickest way to undo background restrictions, disabled notifications, or stuck default app assignments.
Blur Effect for App Previews
When you swipe through recent apps on your Xiaomi phone, the preview thumbnails can show account balances, chat messages or other personal details in plain sight. MIUI lets you blur individual app previews so text and layout become unreadable at a glance. The setting works per app, which means it is easy to forget for apps you add later, such as a new banking or messaging app.
Allow or Deny Apps to Modify System Settings
Some apps on your Xiaomi phone quietly hold permission to change system settings like brightness, do-not-disturb or notification behavior, even after you stopped using them. If a random app is toggling display or sound settings on its own, this hidden permission is usually the cause. You can review and revoke it for individual apps without affecting others.
Create or Remove Dual Apps
Running two WhatsApp or Facebook accounts on one phone usually fails because those apps only allow a single login at a time. Dual apps gets around that by cloning the app into a second icon with its own data and notifications, fully separate from the original. Without setting this up, you are stuck logging out and back in every time you want to switch accounts.
Automatic App Updates Settings
If your Xiaomi phone only refreshes apps once it finds a Wi-Fi network, updates can lag behind for days when you are mostly on mobile data. This behavior comes from the Play Store auto-update setting, which defaults to Wi-Fi only on most Xiaomi devices. You can switch it to update over any network or turn automatic updates off completely.
Add Apps to a Folder on the Home Screen
Dragging one app at a time into a folder gets tedious once your home screen fills up with dozens of icons. Xiaomi phones running MIUI let you group several apps into a single folder in one move instead of repeating the drag-and-drop for each icon. If you only know the old hold-and-drag method, sorting a full app drawer can take much longer than it should.
Enable or Disable Captions for Supported Apps
When captions do not appear during playback, or they show up in a style that is hard to read against light backgrounds, the caption settings on your Xiaomi phone are usually the reason. This affects apps that hook into the system-wide caption feature, not just the video player itself. Size, color, and background of the caption text can all be adjusted separately from whether captions are shown at all.
Uninstall an App
Old apps you never open still take up storage on a Xiaomi phone, and the app drawer gets crowded fast. Dragging an icon off the home screen sometimes only removes a shortcut instead of the actual app, which is confusing if the storage warning keeps coming back. Uninstalling deletes the app together with all its saved data permanently, so it helps to know exactly which tap does what before you remove several apps at once.
Turn Read in Background On or Off for Select to Speak
When Select to Speak keeps talking after you leave an app, the Read in background option is doing its job, but not everyone wants that. Xiaomi flags this feature as experimental, so it can behave inconsistently between MIUI versions and sometimes keeps narrating text you no longer need read aloud. Knowing where the toggle sits helps you decide whether the trade-off is worth it.