The Xiaomi brand has already earned a reputation globally as a formidable competitor to the American and Korean top sellers Apple and Samsung, respectively. With that, I must also include that this brand also produced the Redmi 8A (basically a “lite” version of the Redmi 8) which was my first ever smartphone that went home with me in March 2020. Now, even after nearly 4–5 years of its official launch in 2019, this device never ceases to amaze me.
Be wary that I may be biased to a certain degree while describing the Redmi 8A due to the existence of certain memories that I had planted my seeds of nostalgia for, during the first post-purchase year.
All those months of playing PUBG Mobile, Free Fire, Call of Duty Mobile, Honkai Impact 3rd, Up The Wall, The Questkeeper, and so on have been quite satisfactory for me — thanks to its Qualcomm™ Snapdragon 439 SoC coupled with an Adreno 505 GPU, very powerful components based on the overall price of the phone itself. Even though it only has 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM it had served well at that time, causing almost no lagging issues at all.
It was very shocking to find such electronic components in a smartphone costing only $90-$100 (around 10,999 BDT) whereas other alternative brands in the market offered similar specifications at a much higher price range than whatever the ingenious Chinese brand allowed. Perhaps that is the power of the economics of scale or the sheer volume of mass production machinery and labour available in The People’s Republic of China.
Obviously those hardware numbers are subpar to today’s models being sold and marketed with having more value for the same price or lower. But to me, it’s more than just a plastic brick — it’s a portable time capsule housing up a lot of the 2020–2021 moments of my life trapped in time within the riddles proposed by zeroes and ones.
The phone had been born with Android 9 (Pie) and MIUI 11 when I first stroked its 6.2" IPS LCD display, equipped with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 (a rare version to find in most budget to mid-range phones even today!). As of now, the unrelenting forces issued by the automatic system updates have matured my Redmi 8A to grow up to Android 10 via MIUI 12.5.2, reaching the end of its life two years ago (in 2022).
This phone is perfectly sized to fit in any average person’s hand comfortably without being too bulky or having the buttons “out of reach”.
The 5000 mAh Li-Poly battery is also another factor to compliment about! Due to the relatively low power electronic components being used in the Olivelite (codename for Redmi 8A M1908C3KG), the power consumption stays at a low level — meaning extra hours of screen time before having to recharge! The Li-Poly battery is favored over the typical Li-Ion technology since they manage to hold their charge more efficiently than the counterpart. For a phone from nearly 5 years ago, indeed every thousand mAh counts!
Lastly, this phone has a built-in radio antennae so you don’t have to worry about carrying a 5.6 mm earphone/headphone jack all the time.
Technically speaking, this phone has been officially abandoned by its manufacturer and will no longer receive any updates. But who cares, as long as you have an Android 10 device to run older apps that may push up “incompatibility errors” when running them on newer devices?
Summary of Benefits and Drawbacks
✅ 5000 mAh Li-Poly battery
✅ Built-in radio antenna
✅ Corning™ Gorilla Glass 5
✅ Access to Android “data” and “obb” folders
❌ MIUI 12.5.2
❌ Bootloader locked forever
❌ 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM
❌ 32 GB eMMC 5.x ROM
Making the device run smoothly
Firstly, I restored everything back to the factory settings and wiped everything from the recovery boot mode and Fastboot (volume down+power buttons) via a PC.
Next up, I replaced all standard Google apps with their equivalent lightweight “Go” editions (i.e. Google Go, Maps Go, Gmail Go); for Meta apps, I installed the “Lite” editions (i.e. Facebook Lite, Instagram Lite). For other social platforms, instead of downloading the app I realized that their web-based shortcuts and PWAs (progressive webapps) are already suitable — leading me to just add shortcuts to their websites (i.e. Discord, X, Threads).
After this, I headed straight on to Google Play Store and disabled my “Auto-update apps” settings. And afterwards, I spammed “uninstall updates” on every system app I found in my “app list” under default Settings.
To make sure that no apps dare to launch themselves automatically, I went to “Autostart” under “Permissions” in the App list Settings category and only picked 2 apps to be allowed that permission; the rest got disabled.
And then, I decided to turn on developer options by tapping the MIUI version in “About phone” several times, and adjusted background processes to let only 2 exist and reduced the animation scales from 1.0x to 0.5x.
And behold! My phone is now smoother than ever!
