MIUI's Camera app is a heavily customized system app with its own AI scene-detection layer, and that extra processing pipeline is a common source of crashes and black previews that don't exist on stock Android camera apps.
- 1Force close MIUI Camera from Recents and reopen it, this alone resolves a large share of black-preview and 'Camera failed to open' reports.
- 2Clear the app's cache: Settings → Apps → Manage apps → Camera → Clear data → choose 'Clear cache' first before the full data wipe.
- 3Disable AI scene detection temporarily: inside the Camera app, tap the AI icon in the viewfinder to turn it off, on some Redmi models a buggy scene-detection model causes recurring preview crashes.
- 4Check for a Camera app update in the Mi App Store / GetApps, separate from a full MIUI system update, Xiaomi patches camera bugs this way between OS releases.
- 5Test the camera hardware directly with our Camera Test tool, if the live feed works there in-browser but MIUI's own Camera app still fails, the fault is confirmed as software.
- 6Check Settings → Apps → Permissions → Camera, confirm MIUI Camera has permission, MIUI's permission manager occasionally revokes it silently after a system update.
- 7Restart the phone fully if any third-party app (a QR scanner, video call app) was using the camera and crashed, MIUI's camera daemon can get stuck locked to that app until reboot.
Tip: If a third-party camera app works fine but MIUI's own Camera app doesn't, that isolates the bug to Xiaomi's software layer specifically, worth reporting via the Feedback app built into MIUI, Xiaomi actively triages those reports.