Older Meitu phones are reportedly running into serious usability problems as their system certificates expire, and affected owners say the brand no longer has an active after-sales technical team for these devices.
According to a report cited by IT Home, some longtime users of Meitu handsets have found that basic recovery and software functions are now breaking down. In the cases described so far, the phones may fail to complete a factory reset, stop downloading apps properly, and even lose normal browser access. Some users also say the devices can no longer shut down as expected.
Customer service has reportedly offered troubleshooting suggestions, but the company also warned that those fixes may not work in every case. More importantly, support staff reportedly acknowledged that Meitu no longer has a dedicated team maintaining or repairing these older phone models. That detail is what makes the issue feel less like a temporary bug and more like the end of practical support for the product line.
The background here goes back several years. Meitu published a farewell message for its smartphone business in 2019 and handed the phone operation over to Xiaomi. After that partnership, the two sides released only one co-branded model, the Xiaomi CC9 Meitu Edition, before the lineup effectively went quiet.
By 2021, Meitu CEO Wu Xinhong said the company would no longer stay in the business of manufacturing and selling smartphones. He also noted at the time that Meitu had taken back the licensing rights connected to its handset brand. With that history in mind, the newly reported system certificate failure problems fit a broader picture: the hardware may still exist in users’ hands, but the ecosystem behind it has largely moved on.
For owners still using these devices, the report is a reminder of how vulnerable aging phones can become once backend certificates expire and long-term phone support disappears. Even when the hardware still powers on, missing maintenance can turn a once-functional handset into something close to a brick.
