Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, faced backlash over his new wallpaper app, Panels, due to its high subscription cost ($49.99/year) and concerns over excessive data permissions.
Brownlee acknowledged user feedback, promising to adjust ad frequency for free users and address privacy concerns, clarifying that the app’s data disclosures were broader than intended.
The app, which offers curated wallpapers and shares profits with artists, aims to improve over time, despite criticisms of its design and monetization approach.
Everyone that buys this garbage deserves to lose their money.
Marques Brownlee: “Don’t pay for what something will be, pay for what it is now” and “I don’t review what will be, but what a product is now”
Also Marques Brownlee: “Pay the subscription fee now for the unnamed unspecified features this will have other than just wallpapers now to fund future development”
Who knew the next company he would “kill” would be his own. The only way to find his app on Android is to use the link from his site because of the generic name.
BTW Wallpaper Engine, which has an android app, is currently $5 Canadian, and I am told with Proton can also work on Linux PC’s and has an huge amount of modifiable wallpapers.
Can people no longer upload a JPG to their phones? What am I missing here?
It sounds like it’s a way to get high quality original art / photos for use as backgrounds and support the people making them too.
New “LOOK I AM RICH” app.
Paying for ANY wallpaper is just silly, much less a subscription model.
The only time you should pay for one if it’s an artist you want to actively support and/or thank for that specific work.
For the last 30 years, they’ve been trying to charge for dumb shit like wallpapers, screen savers, mouse cursors.
Who are these people who buy them? And what’s wrong with you?
When toy story came out, i saw this toy story pc game. I put all my money together just to then find out that it wasn’t a game, it was a cd rom with like 12 wallpapers on it.
I would cry so hard.
ringtones baby
I still have PTSD from the era of the ‘polyphonic ringtone’ hype. Those were the ‘fancier’ ringtones that weren’t just your usual beep or bell.
Usually you’d buy them by sending a text message to some expensive number and it would be sent to your phone. If you were dumb, you could get basically scammed into a ‘subscription’ so you’d get sent these expensive ringtones frequently. Many a teen got yelled at for that mistake in the late 90’s.
If you were a tech savvy lad, you could hook your phone up to your Windows PC and upload shitty ringtones yourself as well as wallpapers and such.
These days, who gives a shit? My iPhone ringtone is still the default ring. I honestly don’t care what it is, as it’s usually just annoying anyway.
I remember watching the rich kid in middle school buy a ring tone right in front of me, flexing that his device could play a 12-second loop of Tubthumping by Chumbawamba.
Yeah, that was a cash cow for a few years and now everybody has their phone on vibrate.
Crazy Frog itensifies
“I hear you”
Corporate PR phrase detected. Product mentally blacklisted
Yikes
I hear you, but I hear the money counter MORE
I hear you, but it was worth a try.
Paying for wallpapers is just not justifiable to me, especially when there are so many sources that offer high quality wallpapers for free, from apps to dedicated forums to simply online search.
It’s cool for people with lots of extra cash I guess. I like that 50% of profits go to the artists.
That said, I am certainly not one of those people with extra money to spend on wallpapers. Seems like we’re not the target demographic.
Maybe that’s part of this guy’s problem here. His channel has a broader appeal than the app, so the people outside the app’s target demographic got irritated.
Muzei - a free wallpaper changer on f-droid
It has many sources for images, like NASA APOD, masterpieces, NatGeo, Ghibli and others.
Walpy is also pretty good. Has various categories and credits each wallpaper′s author.
Wow I had no idea the subscription was that much. He mentioned it in a video without saying the price and I still wouldn’t do it.
Wallpapers on phone are useless because apps are always full screen.
Who would pay for such thing?
Yeah, you last part us on point. This is for smaller demographic while the subscribers of his YT channel is more average tech enthusiasts.
Haven’t watched him in forever. Has he reached full money grab?
No sane individual is going to pay for a subscription for phone backgrounds.
That is absolutely a stupid business idea and the people who came up with it should be publicly shamed.
I’ve not looked into it, but it’s probably pitched as a feel-good way of supporting artists.
You think it’s new? It’s have already done by so many people in Android community. Like Widepaper, Wallfever, Wallbyte etc. These all apps are paid. People actually pay for Wallpapers.
I think buying an app for a couple of quid that has a good curated collection of wallpapers, a nice UX, etc. is a completely fair price to pay for the convenience. I like supporting devs. I fail to see the stupidity.
A $12 monthly subscription is an entirely different beast, though.
Or even a market that let you just buy individual wallpapers as you want them, like how you used to be able to buy individual tracks in itunes instead of a whole album.
A subscription model is a bit silly.
Remember when people paid for ringtones? Doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid, especially as a subscription, but people do stupid things and other people take advantage.
And Ringback tones too. For when people called you, so they could listen to your favorite song instead of the ring of the phone while waiting for you to pick up.
I forgot about that! And most songs sound like ass when you hear it over a phone, especially before whatever they did in the last decade to make voice calls more clear
