On more than one occasion someone has pointed the finger at Xiaomi, accusing her of illegal practices such as espionage or censorship. You may remember when an online investigation led to the modification of Xiaomi browsers. Or more recently, the censorial accusations by the Lithuanian government, promptly denied by many, with lots of evidence in its favor.
But you know, the stigma of Chinese companies is something that companies like Xiaomi continue to fight with, even and above all when it comes to MIUI. From time to time there is someone on the net who wonders if there are suspicious elements within it that could compromise the security and privacy of users. For example, have you ever heard of the MIUI Daemon app?
How to disable or delete MIUI Daemon
The more geeks of you may have noticed that, by digging among the Xiaomi system apps, there is one called MIUI Daemon (com.miui.daemon). If you have a Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO smartphone you can check it yourself: go to Settings/App/App management, click on the 3 dots at the top, select View all applications and you should see the MiuiDaemon app appear in the list.
Basically, neither Xiaomi nor MIUI give us a way to know what the MIUI Daemon app does, as there is no way to start it and get some more information. A deeper analysis of the software makes us discover that it is a statistical collection app: but what data does it collect?
According to what was discovered by the Xiaomiui team, the MIUI Daemon app is in charge of collecting data on the following information:
- Screen switch-on time
- Amount of storage memory
- Loading main memory statistics
- Battery and CPU statistics
- Status of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
- IMEI number
Even if it is not written anywhere explicitly, it is plausible that the statistical collection that MIUI Daemon puts in place is anonymous. Usually, these are useful data to make Xiaomi developers understand how to improve the software experience based on the findings.
But if you prefer to avoid the MIUI Daemon app from tracking the aforementioned statistics on your Xiaomi, Redmi, or POCO smartphone, here’s how you can do it. The simplest procedure is to deactivate the app using the standard procedure:
- Go to Settings/Password and security
- Scroll down and click on Authorizations and revocations
- Disable the MiuiDaemon toggle
If instead, you prefer to delete the MIUI Daemon app from your Xiaomi smartphone, in this case, there is a dedicated guide that is right for you. However, as some users on Reddit (1, 2) report, uninstalling it could lead to some bugs: consider whether to proceed anyway.