What is Meitu? What to Know About the Anime Face App

Meitu is an anime photo filter app that is taking over Twitter and Facebook. If you’ve seen a friend post an anime style photo, they are likely using the Meitu app to do it. This is what you need to know about this app, including how to download and use it.

The Meitu app is making it’s way to the top of the app stores in a viral takeover of social media and the top apps chart on the iPhone, iPad and Android.

We’ll explain what Meitu is and how you can use it as well as a funny way to put the Meitu app into overdrive.

What is Meitu?

The Meitu app is available on iPhone, iPad and on Android. You can use it to turn your photo or selfie into an anime style photo that you can share on social media or save to your camera roll.

This app uses facial recognition technology similar to what you see with Snapchat Lenses to identify your face and then change the look completely, while also adding a new background.

Meitu is not a new app, and it does a lot more than simply turn you into an anime style photo, but that is the reason many users are downloading it.

How to Use Meitu

When you open the Meitu app it isn’t immediately clear what you need to do to use it to make yourself into a hand drawn anime caricature.

Tap on the hand drawn option in the main menu. From there you can take a photo or you can choose one from your camera roll. When trying to load photos we ran into errors more often, so you may need to use the camera.

Once this loads you can choose the style that you want by tapping and swiping. Tap and hold Compare to see how it looks versus your original photo. Once you are satisfied you can save the photo to your camera roll and share it. You do not need to share to social media if you don’t want to.

This works best with one person in the frame, but you can include different backgrounds or pets to add to your photos.

Is Meitu Free?

The Meitu app is free to download and to use. There are not in-app purchases in the app right now so you don’t need to worry about spending money later on purpose or accidentally.

There is a marketplace where you can download stickers, effects and other upgrades. right now they are free, but we could see the company charge for them soon.

Meitu Privacy Concerns

https://twitter.com/JZdziarski/status/822154173219307520

Although the Meitu app is free there are some privacy concerns due to the code in the app and the permissions that the app asks for.

According to investigations, the Android Meitu app asks for a lot of information that a photo editing app doesn’t need to know. This includes the ability to run at startup,  location and your phone number. The app also wants permission to make phone calls, change audio settings and more.

https://twitter.com/JZdziarski/status/822140741942214657

On the iPhone Meitu app there are requests to see if your phone is jailbroken, what carrier you are using and it is able to create a unique identifier for your iPhone.

Additional investigations suggest the iPhone app is only sending the standard set of information that many apps send about users.