HyperOS 3 customization is better, but not dramatically different

I’m going to be upfront: HyperOS 3 does not feel like a massive customization overhaul compared with HyperOS 2. After setting up my Xiaomi 17, I ran through the issues I previously called out, and disappointingly, not one of the 11 issues I mentioned had been addressed.

That said, HyperOS 3 does add some genuinely useful quality-of-life improvements. Most of the good stuff is on the lock screen, where Xiaomi has finally made it easier to create, preserve, and switch between different setups instead of losing older configurations every time you experiment.

Start with these lock screen settings before customizing

Before building the lock screen itself, I’d first go into Settings, then Lock screen, and enable a few toggles. The important one is press and hold to edit, because that lets you customize the lock screen directly from the lock screen itself. I also enable double tap to wake or turn off, then set my lock screen shortcuts to torch on one side and camera on the other.

Once those are enabled, you can lock the phone, double tap to wake it, long press, and tap customize lock screen. After biometrics, HyperOS 3 takes you into the new lock screen customization system.

Wallpaper sets finally make lock screen experiments safer

The new wallpaper sets system is one of my favorite practical changes. In older versions of HyperOS, if you customized your lock screen and then moved on to a different look, the old setup basically disappeared into the ether. Now, if you have a setup you like, you can swipe left, tap the blue plus button, and create a new lock screen without deleting the previous one.

That makes experimentation way less annoying. You can build a clean clock setup, try a totally different wallpaper, then jump back into the My set section whenever you want to return to something you already liked.

AI dynamic wallpapers look great, but depth effect is the trade-off

HyperOS 3 can turn a custom static wallpaper image into a live animated wallpaper. To do it, unlock the phone, open Settings, go to Personalization, then choose AI dynamic wallpapers. From there, you can tap the blue plus button, add your own image, wait for it to analyze, generate the wallpaper, and apply it to the lock screen or home screen.

The results can look fantastic, but there’s a big catch: dynamic wallpapers usually do not work with the depth effect. When I tried dozens of wallpapers from my Lumina Walls app, the only one I could get working as both a dynamic wallpaper and with depth effect had a human as the foreground subject.

Lock screen clocks are the biggest HyperOS 3 upgrade

The biggest difference between HyperOS 3 and HyperOS 2 is the extra control over lock screen clocks. You can tap the clock and choose from classic clocks, big clocks, eastern aesthetic clocks, magazine clocks, and doodle lock screen options. I did find a couple of the doodle options a little glitchy, but the big clocks are genuinely lovely.

After choosing a clock style, you can move into the fonts tab and switch between blend, overlap, and gradient effects. I tend to prefer gradient or blend. You can also tweak the hour and minute colors separately, which makes it much easier to match the clock to the wallpaper rather than just accepting the default look.

The best result is when the clock, color, wallpaper, and depth effect all work together. In my setup, the hour digit hides subtly behind the top of the mountain, and the colors match the wallpaper beautifully. You can also play with extra effects, but because they don’t work in conjunction with the depth effect, I leave them disabled.

Always-on display can animate into the lock screen clock

The always-on display settings are also worth checking. In Settings, go to Personalization, then Always-on display. Mine is set to match the lock screen, but if you tap custom, you can manually change options like battery indicator and notifications.

I leave the battery indicator and notifications turned on, then make sure the animation transition is enabled. With that applied, the always-on display animates beautifully into the lock screen clock when you wake the phone, and it animates back again when the phone goes to sleep.

Home screen settings I change immediately

Home screen customization has not changed much in HyperOS 3, but there are still a few settings I change right away. Long press the home screen, tap Settings, then More to get into the main home screen controls.

• Use the home screen layout with an app drawer.
• Disable place new apps on the home screen.
• Set swipe down to notification shade and control center.
• Enable double tap an empty spot to lock the phone.
• Disable fill cells of uninstalled apps.
• Set don’t show text to on widgets.
• Use the 5x8 home screen layout for more flexibility.
• Switch recents from vertical to horizontal.

If you have never customized a HyperOS home screen before, the app drawer layout is the first thing I’d change because it behaves more like most Android operating systems. I also prefer swipe down opening the notification shade and control center for the same reason: it feels more familiar if you use other Android skins.

App drawer color grouping is clever, but I still leave it off

One fun option that was already around in HyperOS 2 is group icons by color. If you enable it and also turn on animations, the app drawer shows colorful dots at the bottom. Tapping a dot filters your apps by the color of their icon.

It is thoughtful, and some people might find it super helpful, but you need a pretty good memory for the color of your app icons. The app category system is similar for me. It fills with suggestions automatically, but the app drawer still starts with an All page, so categorized apps don’t really get filtered out in the way I’d want. I tend to leave both options disabled.

App drawer transparency looks good, but it needs wallpaper blur

The app drawer background can also be tweaked. By default, it switches between a fully opaque light and dark background depending on whether the system dark theme is active. I prefer increasing the transparency slider somewhere between 25 and 50%.

That gives the app drawer a softer look, but I don’t love that HyperOS does not blur the wallpaper behind it. A blur option would make the transparent background feel much more polished, so hopefully that gets added in a future software update.

Home screen search is mostly a visual choice for me

HyperOS 3 adds a new home screen search option, and it is disabled by default. When enabled, it replaces the small app drawer arrow indicator with a liquid glass inspired search button at the bottom of the home screen. You can tap it to launch search, of course, but I honestly don’t see myself using it much.

For me, the decision is mostly visual: do I prefer the search bar or the little arrow? I left it enabled because it suited the setup I was building, not because the search button suddenly became essential.

For a truly custom HyperOS home screen, use widgets instead of icon packs

If you want a home screen that looks nothing like the default HyperOS layout, the process is basically unchanged from my previous HyperOS customization video. The key is to use third-party widgets instead of regular icons. That is the workaround, because standard third-party icon packs are not an option here.

For inspiration, I recommend checking out my app Palette, which hosts thousands of custom home screen setups. I used a sleek setup called iOS Style, and the widgets were custom made and downloadable through Palette itself, which makes recreating the look much quicker.

The widget setup relies on KWGT. After downloading the wallpaper and the backup file from Palette, I extracted the zip folder, opened the widget folder, then started with a blank home screen. Unfortunately, there is no select all method for widgets, folders, or dock apps, so clearing the home screen has to be done manually.

How I imported and resized the KWGT widgets

Once the home screen is blank, long press, tap Widgets, and find KWGT. Searching for KWGT works, but HyperOS adds suggested widgets above it, so I prefer using the letter sidebar and jumping straight to K. Then add a basic 1 by 1 KWGT widget as the starting point.

After placing the widget, long press it, choose adjust size, and stretch it across the screen to match the setup. Tap the widget to open KWGT, go to the library page, tap import, navigate to the downloaded iOS theme folder, open the iOS Widgets folder, and choose the widget file. The creator labeled the files clearly, so I started with the one called top, saved it, and repeated the same process for the other widgets.

The result is very close to the original setup visually. The only real mismatch is the dock, because that area is reserved for native app icons, so I could not place the fourth bottom widget there.

Don’t forget to fix the widget tap actions

Before calling the setup finished, you need to edit the KWGT tap actions so the widgets open apps that are actually installed on your phone. For one of the widgets, I opened KWGT, tapped the pencil icon, went into the shortcuts tab, and changed each shortcut to the correct installed app.

If you need to add a shortcut that does not already exist, open the widget, find the relevant overlap group, tap the item you want to make interactive, then go to the touch tab. Tap the plus icon, change the action to launch app, and pick the app you want. I set up shortcuts for apps like Clock, Camera, and Calendar, and once saved, the custom widgets worked as functional launchers.

The animations are not perfect, but they are pretty dang good. More importantly, the finished home screen looks highly customized while staying functional, which is exactly the point of doing this with widgets rather than just chasing a static look.

Bonus HyperOS tip: uninstall pre-installed apps in one go

One last thing I always deal with on HyperOS phones is bloatware. How bad it is depends on the device, but there is a much easier way to remove a bunch of pre-installed apps at once instead of uninstalling them one by one.

Open the relevant Xiaomi app from the app drawer, go to the Profile tab, then tap Uninstall. Use the filter option and change it to installation date. If you scroll all the way down, you should find the pre-installed apps, then you can select the ones you want to remove.

I selected a bunch of Xiaomi apps along with Facebook, WPS Office, Amazon Shopping, and TikTok, then tapped uninstall. HyperOS removed them in one go without needing to keep pressing extra confirmation buttons for each app.