Xiaomi, a Chinese company which makes MI phone is also well known for it’s custom ROM MIUI. MiUI has been a big part of the company’s success strategy with loyal user base mostly in china dedicated to MiUI and updates are sent weekly. Xiaomi’s devices are currently running on MiUI 6 which was built entirely by MIUI team, but this is going to be changed as MI is looking to target it devices internationally.
The next version of Xiaomi’s well known MiUI is being developed in conjunction with the AOKP (Android Open Kang Project) team, also known as Team Kang. The team wrote a blog post making the announcement, revealing that it has been in talks with Xiaomi. MIUI 7 will be based on Android 5.1 and will debut on the Xiaomi MI5.
As per the AOKP blogpost,
MIUI 7, (which the team internally calls codename MiKangy, not to be confused with MiKandi), is a whole new take on the Android UX. The idea behind it is to kang all important features from the top ROMs like CM, PA, Omni and AOKP and create an experience which completely submerges the user in his own world. The UI will evolve with the user, and thus a few months after usage, the UI of each Mi 5 phone will be different – personalised to the traits of it’s individual user.
MarcLandis, who was leading development on AOKP, has been appointed to lead MiKangy technically, while Zaphod will be overlooking the product development. Only yesterday they were found discussing how this project will shoot an arrow through the knee of CyanogenMod and snatch it from Cyanogen, even before Kirt McMaster is able to snatch Android from Google, and of course we have a few inside men in form of Roman and Tom to pull that off. From the rate at which development is going on, I believe this can very well be true.
With Cyanogen parterning with various OEMs and OnePlus grabbing hold of the ParanoidAndroid team, the folks at Xiaomi started considering that to have a larger share of the international market, they needed to collaborate with some established custom ROM community.
Source: AOKP blog post