Xiaomi is working on its own front-facing slow-motion “Slofie” feature

Slofies are all the rage these days — or at least that’s what smartphone OEMs think. The Apple iPhone 11 boasts of slow-motion front-facing videos as one of its highlight features, with Apple calling it “slofie”, short for slow-motion selfie. Android smartphones have been capable of slow-motion video through their rear camera for some years now, but no OEM really paid attention to bringing over the feature to the front-facing camera, perhaps because no one really asked for it. But now, Samsung has begun rolling out the slofie feature to the Samsung Galaxy S10, and Xiaomi is expected to follow suit by introducing slofies to its devices.

An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.

As spotted by XDA Member kacskrz, Xiaomi is working on bringing in the slofie feature to MIUI devices. We could spot code evidence within the MIUI Camera app that suggests that Xiaomi has added a new slow-motion mode for the front camera that records videos at 1280 x 720 at 120fps. There also exist several methods to check if the phone model is defined to support this mode for the front camera, indicating that there may be a minimum hardware requirement in place to ensure a smooth experience.

As to when the feature will be released, our best guess is that Xiaomi could use this as a talking point for the upcoming Xiaomi Mi CC9 Pro. The camera already is the major talking point for the Mi CC9 Pro, with the 108MP primary camera being the main point of focus, followed by the optical zoom camera that can achieve 50x digital zoom, and then flanked by three more cameras and four LEDs. With so much attention on the rear camera setup, having this feature in place for the Mi CC9 Pro will give it something to boast about on the front too. The Mi CC9 Pro is launching in China on November 5, 2019, and the device will be launched globally as the Mi Note 10 on November 14.

Thanks to PNF Software for providing us a license to use JEB Decompiler, a professional-grade reverse engineering tool for Android applications.