Posts From Aamir Siddiqui

Aamir Siddiqui
Aamir Siddiqui

I am a tech journalist with XDA since 2015, while being a qualified business-litigation lawyer with experience in the field. A low-end smartphone purchase in 2011 brought me to the forums, and it's been a journey filled with custom ROMs ever since. When not fully dipped in smartphone news, I love traveling to places just to capture pictures of the sun setting. You can reach out to me at [email protected]

Download: MIUI 12 stable update rolling out to several Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO devices

Download: MIUI 12 stable update rolling out to several Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO devices

November 24, 2020
MIUI 12 is the newest big release for Xiaomi smartphones, perhaps even bigger than an Android version jump. Features on Xiaomi devices are dictated more by their MIUI versions than the underlying Android version, so a MIUI version upgrade is an exciting event. The first batch of devices to receive the MIUI 12 stable update...
India bans 43 more Chinese apps, including AliExpress and Lalamove

India bans 43 more Chinese apps, including AliExpress and Lalamove

November 24, 2020
The ban hammer on Chinese apps has struck again, as the Government of India has now added 43 more apps to the ever-expanding list of banned apps in India. The ban wave began with the first set comprising of 59 apps including TikTok and Mi Community, then another 47, another 118 including PUBG Mobile, and...
Google prepares to decouple new emojis from Android system updates

Google prepares to decouple new emojis from Android system updates

November 24, 2020
Emojis have become an integral part of our informal expression. These tiny graphical assets add emotions, intention, and character to mere words. The frequent addition of new emojis to the Unicode standard is testimony to their popularity. Whenever Unicode gets new emojis, we need to wait for an OS upgrade to reach our phones to...
Samsung Galaxy S21, Z Fold 3 to feature S Pen support as Note line reportedly discontinued

Samsung Galaxy S21, Z Fold 3 to feature S Pen support as Note line reportedly discontinued

November 23, 2020
2020 was a strong year for Samsung, with its three main lineups — the Samsung Galaxy S20 series, the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 series, and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold series — all drawing overall positive reactions. But look deeper and you will start to notice that some of the lines between these series have...
NVIDIA bypasses Apple’s App Store, launches GeForce NOW on iOS via Safari

NVIDIA bypasses Apple’s App Store, launches GeForce NOW on iOS via Safari

November 19, 2020
Cloud gaming, or game streaming as some others call it, is promising to be the future of gaming, freeing up users from the constraints of physical hardware and letting them game anywhere thanks to the omnipresence of the cloud. Most big names have pitched in their own game streaming service, and while the ecosystem slowly...
OriginOS is Vivo’s latest software release based on Android 11

OriginOS is Vivo’s latest software release based on Android 11

November 19, 2020
Vivo's primary UX skin has been FunTouch OS for a few years now, and the skin was recently rebased onto Android 11 for certain phones. Surprisingly, the company had even beat Google to launching the first phone with Android 11 with the launch of the Vivo V20. The UX skin is overdue for a refresh,...
WhatsApp tests new wallpaper features, video muting, and a read later feature

WhatsApp tests new wallpaper features, video muting, and a read later feature

November 19, 2020
WhatsApp is by far one of the most popular IM apps out there, if not the most popular. The app is used by millions of people around the world every day. But as opposed to its massive scale of operations, newer features are slower to roll out to the IM app. After rolling out features...
Redmi Note 9T passes through certification, will come with a MediaTek 5G SoC

Redmi Note 9T passes through certification, will come with a MediaTek 5G SoC

November 17, 2020
Xiaomi is gearing up to launch the next lineup of devices under the successful Redmi Note branding. We recently reported on what we presume will be called the Redmi Note 10 4G, as it passed through TENAA. A few more Xiaomi-Redmi devices have passed through TENAA, and recent certification filings indicate that one of the...
F(x)tec Pro1 gets unofficial LineageOS 18.0 based on Android 11

F(x)tec Pro1 gets unofficial LineageOS 18.0 based on Android 11

November 16, 2020
London-based startup F(x)tec launched the Pro1 back in September last year. At launch, the device ran a near-stock version of Android 9.0 Pie with just a couple of additional apps that had been optimized to work with its physical keyboard. The device received official LineageOS 16 as well as official LineageOS 17.1 support. The phone also served...
Qualcomm receives license to sell 4G chipsets to Huawei

Qualcomm receives license to sell 4G chipsets to Huawei

November 16, 2020
Huawei has been backed into a corner for quite some time now, because of US restrictions on the Chinese company. To get some breathing room from its current tight spot, the company has reportedly even finalized a buyer for its Honor smartphone business. Some more relief came in the form of a license to purchase...
POCO X3 kernel sources are still not available, despite a promise of launch-day release

POCO X3 kernel sources are still not available, despite a promise of launch-day release

November 13, 2020
The POCO X3 NFC was launched back on September 7, 2020, bringing around a very high-value package at an affordable price tag. POCO repeated the same act with the POCO X3 in India, launched on September 22, 2020, but with slight differences from the globally launched variant: a bigger battery and no NFC. Two months...
Android’s Neural Networks API now supports hardware-accelerated inferencing with Facebook’s PyTorch Framework

Android’s Neural Networks API now supports hardware-accelerated inferencing with Facebook’s PyTorch Framework

November 12, 2020
Machine Learning has shaped our present in many ways that we don't even notice it anymore. Tasks that previously were either impossible have now become trivial to execute, making the technology and its benefits even more widely accessible to the population at large. A lot of this is made possible through on-device machine learning and...