Xiaomi partnership with Leica seemingly confirmed by MIUI app

Some partnerships between phone makers and camera companies seem to be little more than marketing ploys. Others, however, have changed mobile photography for the better - and perhaps none more than the cooperation between Huawei and Leica. However, with Huawei's well documented problems over the past few years, stemming from various US government bans, it's been selling way less phones than it used to, and Leica might be looking to partner with another smartphone maker.

It's been rumored already for a few months: the Xiaomi 12 Ultra's camera module will be Leica branded. But... could this be for real? According to some new information, yes.

An enterprising soul went and did a deep dive into the Gallery Editor app built into Xiaomi's Chinese MIUI ROM. And what he found there, in this app's code, are translation strings directly related to Leica. The strings refer to filters that can be used when editing photos and videos, which means we should expect to see some Leica-branded filters marketed by Xiaomi alongside the phone's co-branding. This is nothing special of course, other phone makers have done the same thing before.

Unfortunately the aforementioned strings aren't implemented yet, so it all looks like some preparatory work for the eventual integration.

While it looks like Xiaomi is indeed going to partner with Leica, what's still unclear is the extent of this partnership. Will this just be an occasion to slap the Leica logo on a phone, add some Leica-inspired filters to the camera and gallery apps, and call it a day (and a marketing win)? Or will Xiaomi actually cooperate with and use Leica's expertise to improve the imaging and video output of the 12 Ultra compared to its competitors? That remains to be seen.

Source (in Polish) | Via