Camera on Redmi Note 10 Pro and Note 10 Pro Max, broken with firmware update

Xiaomi is inviting Redmi Note 10 Pro and Note 10 Pro Max phone owners for a free service center intervention aimed at “fixing” the broken camera following a MIUI 13 update.

Apparently, the inconvenience is only for owners of phones updated to the India version of MIUI 13 firmware, with the update leaving the phone’s camera unusable, with the capture app crashing with an error message. Judging by the decision taken to recall affected phones, the problem that manifests itself even when using other capture apps installed from the Play Store is more serious than a simple bug snuck into the phone’s software.

It’s unclear for now whether the intervention involves fine-grained changes to the phones’ software configuration, or physical replacement of the camera mode. What is certain is that the problem cannot be fixed by simply automatically applying a new firmware patch. Xiaomi reps only state that the repair is completely free of charge, with unlucky ones who have found their phones broken following the firmware update simply having to visit any of the more than 2,000 authorised service centres offered by the company across India.

Certainly, this is not the first incident of its kind, with Xiaomi last year (according to its own statistics) replacing the screen of 0.001% of Redmi Note 10 phones in circulation at the time, thus addressing a hardware flaw that went unnoticed in internal tests and manifested some time after the phones reached consumers. Other issues were also reported with the Poco X3 Pro series, addressed by replacing/repairing the phone’s motherboard.