MINI OS9 in 2026: Two Years In, Still Not Finished

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MINI OS9 turned two earlier year. At its best, it’s brilliant. On a bad day, it’s still a mess.

Recently, I got some seat-time in an all-new 2026 Countryman S for some real-world testing. The intention wasn’t to focus on MINI OS9 – the operating system that powers the circular display and most of the car’s functionality. But as it turns out, that quickly became a big focus. 

I got in the car and immediately paired my iPhone and got CarPlay working. I set the designation in Google Maps and headed out. Then, I decided to switch over to MINI’s native interface instead, mostly because I like driving with the full circular display and the built in software has genuinely gotten good in places. Then all hell broke loose.

The CarPlay connection dropped. The podcast I’d been listening to went silent, on my phone and in the car. I restarted the phone. I restarted the car. Nothing. I fell back to straight Bluetooth, old school. I thought, ok, this isn’t bad. I get to experience MINI’s native audio player without CarPlay. Then I turned navigation back on and audio cut out entirely, the display still showing a track playing that no speaker in the car would produce. This is MINI OS9 in the summer of 2026, two years after this generation of Cooper and Countryman reached driveways, and it is still not the finished infotainment system MINI told us it would be.

The Good, The Bad, The Bugs

None of this is new. It’s the same list we were writing about when OS9 launched: CarPlay dropping out mid drive, Bluetooth that won’t hold a pairing, audio that stops working and doesn’t tell you why. These are the kind of infotainment problems that used to define the bottom tier of the industry, not a flagship system two years into its life. What’s changed is the excuse. A brand new operating system stumbling in its first year is forgivable, expected even. A system still doing this in year two, on hardware that’s been in customer hands the whole time, is something else.

It’s not just audio though. OS9 is still slow, and the interface still fights you more than it should. There’s a rigidity to how it’s structured, a systematic, expected interaction pattern for everything, and that consistency is part of what we’ve always liked about it. Unfortunately, this the case of OS9, that also means too many common tasks take too many steps. Yes, there are shortcuts. The star button on the steering wheel pulls up a shortlist, and a drag up from the bottom of the screen does the same. They’re genuinely useful, and we’ve written a full guide to using them well. But shortcuts shouldn’t be the thing standing between an owner and basic sluggishness. You shouldn’t need a workaround for software that’s supposed to already be finished.

June 2023 was my first taste of OS9 and it was rough but very promising

Less Progress Than Expected

We saw this coming, three years ago in June of 2023. MINI flew a group of us to Munich, sat us down under NDA in a dark room, and showed us OS9 for the first time, months before anyone got to see it. It was early beta software but the promise was there. But you could see what they were building, and it was genuinely exciting, enough that my first look at that circular display leaned optimistic despite the visible unfinished edges. It was built on the same foundation as BMW’s software and was designed to be updated early and often to fix bugs and add features. The idea was that MINI would push updates aggressively. The bugs would leave. The sluggishness would disappear. We’d end up with a great system.

Our early CarPlay review flagged real problems but stayed patient, because MINI kept shipping updates and the trajectory looked right. We covered the functionality boosts. We covered the over the air updates as they landed. Each one felt like evidence of progress. Sitting in this car in 2026, it feels like that progress has stalled.

Hardware or Software?

This isn’t a hardware complaint, and that’s what makes it more frustrating, not less. The Snapdragon platform underpinning OS9’s digital architecture was pitched to us at launch as more than powerful enough to keep everything smooth and to future proof the system for years of updates. Whatever happened between that pitch and what’s running in cars today, the result in 2026 is a system that still stutters on tasks it should handle without effort. The technical stack seemingly is good. None of this should be hard to iterate on with the right team and the right infrastructure behind it. That’s precisely why it’s so surprising these deficiencies are still here.

What MINI needs to do from here

MINI needs a real and transparent plan to fix the sluggishness and obvious bugs in the software. The kind you’d expect from a software company rather than an automaker that happens to ship software. Two plus years into this car’s life, we’ve gotten scattered functionality additions and presumably some bug fixes, but the core complaints from day one, CarPlay issues, overall sluggishness, an interface that can feel overly complex under pressure, are unchanged. If you bought a Cooper or Countryman with this interface two and a half years ago and have been living with it ever since, you’ve probably gotten proficient with its quirks. But proficiency isn’t the same as trust, and the underlying frustration with the system itself doesn’t go away just because you’ve learned to route around it. That kind of low grade frustration is corrosive, to the ownership experience and, over time, to the brand.

Here’s the part that stings. MINI’s mechanical reliability has genuinely turned around, climbing from the bottom of the industry rankings toward the top five in recent years, which is a real accomplishment for a brand that spent a long time living down its reputation. But as these cars have become more software defined, with more of the ownership experience routed through that circular screen, MINI has fallen into the same trap so many automakers have: building the car like a car and not building the software like a product. The apps most of us actually enjoy using ship fixes constantly, add functionality constantly, and generally get better with age. OS9 hasn’t shown that pattern, and it’s fair to wonder what that does to customer satisfaction, and to how the brand is perceived, over the next few years.

It’s Time for OS9 to Mature

Early on, we gave OS9 real grace, because we could see it iterating fast and trending in the right direction, and that made it easy to note the problems and move past them. We can’t turn a blind eye in 2026.

As I write this, my podcast is playing but no sound coming from the car’s speakers despite the screen insisting otherwise. So I’ve moved to the last resort – I’m not listening to audio from my iPhone’s own speaker. A few miles later I get it to work, but at only 10% volume with the car’s volume turned up to 100%. Yes it’s a first world problem. But it’s the glaring, absurd bug that makes an owner want to give up and trade the car in.

So I give up and I soldier on for the next three hours listening through my phone’s speaker. As I turns out, it’s more reliable than MINI OS9.

The post MINI OS9 in 2026: Two Years In, Still Not Finished appeared first on MotoringFile.

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