Xiaomi has been dominating the market budget and mid-range Indian markets thanks to their Redmi series of devices. There's the regular Redmi series that are priced a little less and have smaller screens compared to the Redmi Note series. The company made massive gains in India thanks to these devices even though, in my personal opinion, they dropped the ball with the naming scheme. In any case, that doesn't seem to have slowed their growth because these phones are selling like hotcakes. Some of their more recent popular devices include the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 and Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro, and for the former, we now have the latest stable Android 8.1 Oreo update.

Just to clear things up, the device sold in India is called the Redmi Note 5 while the one Xiaomi sells in China is called the Redmi 5 Plus. Both of them shipped with Android 7.1 Nougat installed on them out of the box. Xiaomi has a good reputation for updating their older devices, but the devices launched after Oreo was already available so some people have been getting worried about when the update would arrive. It was back in June when the Redmi Note 5 Pro received its Global Stable ROM of MIUI 9.5 which was based on Android 8.1 Oreo.

So naturally, this made customers owning the Redmi Note 5/Redmi 5 Plus beginning start to wonder where their update was. There are a number of reasons that could have caused these devices to receive the update much later than the Redmi Note 5 Pro. It could have been a hardware related bug, or some software feature not performing as it should, or they just had the Redmi Note 5 and the Redmi 5 Plus further down the priority list. Whatever the reason, the stable Android 8.1 Oreo recovery ROM for the device is now available to the public. This is the Global version of the update and will bring you up to version MIUI v9.6.5.5.0.

Thanks for the tip yshalsager!

Android 8.1 Oreo Recovery ROM for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5/Redmi 5 Plus