Chinese ROMs come without support for many languages. Even when using English there are still things which are in Chinese.

The people selling the devices on AliExpress are selling then with a “global rom”. The issue here is that the rom doesn’t exist officially. So no updates are available and you don’t know what’s actually inside it.

xiaomi.eu provide a modified version of the Chinese rom with language support and some other things. The issue is they charge for this through patreon for any mediatek devices. You have to keep paying if you want security updates. This is immoral and probably illegal as they don’t own MIUI or Android and copyleft is designed to prevent this kind of thing.

To add insult to injury they started offering some mediatek roms for free. When people stopped paying the patreon they removed them from the download sites.

Shame on them and shame on the AliExpress sellers. If anyone knows a good course on building android roms and reverse engineering them let me know. Maybe I can fix this situation.