Selfie app Meitu wants to be a social platform (but users just want nice selfies)

They also have an awesome Sailor Moon phone

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Meitu’s new social feed has pictures of travel, food, makeup and fashion tips. (Picture: Meitu)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 8:48pm, 24 Sep 2018Updated: 8:40am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

China loves selfies. That’s why selfie-beautifying apps like Meitu are so big in the country.

But right now, after selfie lovers edit their faces with Meitu, they leave the app to post their photos on WeChat or Weibo. That is something the app’s maker badly wants to change.

Meitu, China’s selfie king

Last week, China’s go-to selfie-altering app Meitu completed what the CEO says was “the biggest revamp in ten years”, putting a new photo-sharing section on the front page together with its beloved editing tools. It’s part of the company’s new goal to become the next big social platform.

In an internal letter about the company’s progress, the company’s CEO Xinhong Wu closed with this quote: “Fate whispers to the warrior, ‘You cannot withstand the storm,” and the warrior whispers back, ‘I am the storm.’’”

(If you’re wondering where the quote is from, well… nobody’s quite sure if it’s originally from an ancient proverb. But it’s more likely that Wu is a Tom Cruise fan, because he says it in the new Mission: Impossible movie.)