Welcome to an Unofficial Xiaomi community on the Fediverse! This is a place to discuss everything related to Xiaomi devices, including news, reviews, tips, tutorials, rooting, and app discussions.
I hope your gf device code name is sweet. There are latest versions available as you can find here. https://xmfirmwareupdater.com/miui/sweet/
If you want the latest version of Android with recent security patch, try lineage os or crdroid. But you have to unlock the bootloader and spend little time tinkering on it. You can find a lot of YouTube videos with step by step instructions. I have a device that runs on crdroid with Android 14.
small status update: i tried the update packages (from both cfirmwareupdater and mi community) and it errored out with the message that the update could not be verified. so i probably need to go the fastboot route anyways so i probably just use an up to date custom rom directly
Thanks for your input. Installing lineage os is something I have thought about. And I'll probably do that since it's eol for Xiaomi.
The model codename is sweet like you deduced (the EEA version btw). I have found those unmodified Roms as well, which is the reason why I am so confused here.
On another note: What made you choose crdroid over stock lineageOS?
What made you choose crdroid over stock lineageOS?
When the google photos became a paid service crdroid was giving an option to do unlimited upload of photos by spoofing the device as pixel. It started like that and it gives more customization compared to lineageOS, so I stuck to it. I used both lineage and crdroid, there is no notable performance difference.
BTW, I'm not longer using Google photos for backup, I setup a homesever and use immich as my backup solution.
One thing to note, it will become very difficult to unlock the bootloader once the device is updated to HyperOS. There is no way to unlock it if you have purchased the china version.