So as we all know, with Android 12, many new features were introduced. And some of the users asked “What is the meaning of this icon on statusbar?”, which was the camera or microphone indicator whenever an app was using any of two.
Although some of them already existed in MIUI, they weren’t available for global users, just for china beta. With the new MIUI global updates based on Android 12, we now see one of new features from Android 12 but was already available in MIUI china is now out to global.
What is the meaning of this icon?
It’s the microphone or the camera indicator. It shows up whenever an app uses any of the two in background, and so the system shows it to inform you. This was one of the features that already existed in MIUI but was only exclusive to the china beta users.
With the release of MIUI based on Android 12, this feature is now available to all users.
As you can see in the picture above, it’s now usable and enabled by default on any device that runs MIUI 13 based on Android 12. Although, they don’t look similar to the one in china ROM. Instead, they look like the one that came in Android 12 AOSP/pure Android, and also doesn’t look like a pill exactly like how it was on china beta users.
So yeah, that explains the meaning of this icon pretty much with the new update. As explained, it wasn’t new in MIUI, but it was not out to global as well.
Although it seems better compared to before as it uses the Google one, it has no longer a quickly stop app button in the menu of it if you compare. So, it is a downside compared to the old one which was done by Xiaomi. Unfortunately Google enforced this so they have to include it like this, and so on they can’t change it.
But that doesn’t mean if Google won’t change their terms of service to at least let the manufacturers to customize the popup while still keeping it, which can make it look alot more better like the Xiaomi one.
If you have the MIUI 13 based on Android 12 but can’t see the icon at all or not have it, you’re probably using one of the first builds of MIUI 13 on your device, which didn’t had that indicator on it. You need to check updates if there’s any.
We also do give articles about whenever a device gets a MIUI update, such as this one for example. So you might want to keep following us to see if there is any update for your device as well and get notified when there is.
So yeah, that pretty much answers what is the meaning of this icon that you get after updating your device.
