If you followed Android phones around 2015, Meizu was hard to miss. It was the Chinese brand with the slim metal phones, the one-button front, the customized Flyme software and, for a while, the most interesting Ubuntu phone on the market. Then, for many readers outside China, it seemed to vanish. So what happened to Meizu? The short answer is that it never disappeared, but it shrank, changed owners and reinvented itself more than once. Here is the longer answer.
From MP3 players to phones
Meizu was founded in 2003 by Jack Wong (Huang Zhang) in Zhuhai, in southern China, and it started out making MP3 players. It built a reputation for well designed portable media players, including the M6 Mini Player, before moving into phones. Its first phone, the M8, ran a Windows CE based system, but the real turning point came on January 1, 2011, when Meizu released the M9, its first Android smartphone. It was a large commercial success in China.
The following year, the Meizu MX introduced Flyme OS, a deeply customized version of Android that became the company’s signature. Flyme was clean, colorful and very different from stock Android, and it gave Meizu a clear identity in a crowded market.
The 2015 peak: m1, MX4 and Ubuntu
By 2015, Meizu was one of the most talked about challenger brands in China. That year is when most of this site’s original news coverage was written, and it shows how busy the company was. The budget Meizu m1 launched at 699 yuan, going straight after rivals in the cheap phone market. The flagship MX4 was the first Meizu phone to offer Alibaba’s YunOS for mainland China alongside Flyme.
The most unusual story was Ubuntu. Meizu worked with Canonical to put Ubuntu Touch on its hardware, and as we reported at the time, the MX4 was shown with Ubuntu at Mobile World Congress. The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition followed, and the PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition was commercially released in February 2016. For Linux fans, it was the closest thing to a mainstream Ubuntu phone they would ever get. Ubuntu Touch never became a serious rival to Android, and Canonical later stepped back from phones, but those devices remain collector items for the open source community.
Why Meizu faded outside China
Meizu’s decline was gradual rather than sudden, and several forces were at work:
- Crushing competition. Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo and Vivo were growing fast in exactly the same price bands, with far bigger marketing budgets and retail networks.
- Too many models. Like many Chinese brands of the time, Meizu launched a wide range of phones, which made its lineup confusing and spread its resources thin.
- Limited global presence. Meizu sold phones in some markets outside China, but it never built the international distribution and carrier deals that its bigger rivals did. For many buyers in Europe and North America, a Meizu was something you imported, not something you bought in a store.
- Shrinking scale. In a business where component costs and software updates reward sheer volume, a smaller player finds it harder to keep up every year.
Meizu kept releasing phones, and many of them were well reviewed, but it became a niche brand with a loyal following rather than a major force.
The Geely takeover
The biggest change came in 2022. In June of that year, Geely, the Chinese automotive group, took control of Meizu, acquiring a 79.09 percent stake through its smartphone venture. By December 2022, founder Huang Zhang had withdrawn, leaving Geely’s group as the sole shareholder. For the first time, Meizu was part of a carmaker’s ecosystem, and its future was tied to cars as much as to phones.
That matters because Geely wanted phones, cars and software to work together. Meizu’s Flyme software began showing up in the context of in-car infotainment, and the brand became part of a wider plan to connect the devices in a driver’s pocket with the screens in their dashboard.
“All in AI”: the 2024 pivot
On February 18, 2024, Meizu made headlines by announcing that it would exit the traditional smartphone industry and move to an “All in AI” focus over the following three years. Many people read that as Meizu quitting phones entirely.
That is not quite what happened. In May 2024, the group announced a full upgrade of its smart ecosystem around a new Flyme AIOS operating system. Meizu kept releasing devices, now framed around artificial intelligence features rather than traditional specifications. Flyme AIOS 2, based on Android 15, launched alongside the Meizu Note 16 series on May 13, 2025, and the Meizu 22 followed on September 19, 2025.
In other words, Meizu did not stop making phones. It stopped describing itself as a traditional phone maker, and it shifted its emphasis toward AI features, vehicle infotainment and AR devices.
So, what is Meizu today?
Meizu today is best understood as a small, specialist brand inside a large automotive group. It still has a recognizable design language and a loyal fan base, especially in China. Its phones are part of a bigger ecosystem story that includes cars and wearable devices, rather than a standalone attempt to beat Samsung or Apple on volume.
For buyers outside China, that means availability remains limited. If you are considering a Meizu phone, check carefully whether the model supports the network bands used by carriers in your country, whether Google services are included on the version you are buying, and how long the software support is expected to last. We have written about what software support promises are actually worth, and that question matters even more for a smaller brand.
The takeaway
Meizu’s story is a familiar one in the smartphone business: an early, innovative player squeezed by much larger rivals, rescued by a new owner and reshaped around that owner’s priorities. It never quite disappeared. It just stopped being the brand you saw in every tech headline. For those of us who remember the m1, the MX4 and the Ubuntu phones, that is a little bittersweet, but it is also a reminder of how quickly the smartphone world moves.
