The Chinese developers behind the MIUI ROM and app suite for Android devices have announced that they’re opening the source code for their software.
MIUI is a custom version of Android that, quite frankly, looks a lot like iOS. The default MIUI home screen, for instance, replaces common application icons of all shapes with square icons — and there’s no app drawer. Instead all of your apps are displayed on the home screen. Unlike Apple’s mobile operating system, MIUI does support home screen widgets though.
The software also has a series of custom apps, a custom notification tray, and a consistent look and feel that was missing from Android until fairly recently.
MIUI is already available for a number of Android phones and tablets. Now that the project is going open source it’s likely that it will be ported to even more devices — and third party developers may have an easier time customizing the software or writing apps that feel like they were designed for MIUI.
The developers have already released the source code for handful of apps including the compass, sound recorder, and file explorer apps.
via Android Central