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.
My phone has a camera… i can set photos as wallpapers…
I got a Note 2 at launch and was showing it off at work to people interested in it.
someone asked about the background and where I got it. said I took it and left it at that.
took the pic of the top of my bathroom trashcan while dumping some toxic waste.
pic is the same trashcan now, like me it’s a bit dented, dirty, and doesn’t open as well as it used to. but, it still works.
No offense but I wouldn’t pay $49 for that. Maybe $48.75, but not $49.
New “LOOK I AM RICH” app.
50/50 cut is borderline predatory. It should be 30/70. It feels like marques is so out of touch with common people.
Removed by mod
He is fronting money for development. Which is not cheap.
Once dev cost stabilizes, I would love to have a better split for artists.
Removed by mod
Spoken like a true non-developer.
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.
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.
Back in the day people paid for ringtones, wallpapers, etc. Dumbest thing ever were ‘ringbacks’ where you paid to have a song or something play when people called you. So the people buying it didn’t even hear it, they just forced other people to listen to a shitty low fidelity garbled mess of a song they liked while you waited for them to pick up the phone.
There are infinite list of things and services that are way too expensive for me to even consider buying but I also don’t go around complaining about them. Move on guys… If you want free wallpapers you can try one of the other 9000 free wallpaper apps available. This is recreational outrage.
Who would pay for this?
Apparently one of the wallpapers is just solid orange. It’s called “Orange”, is labeled as “abstract”, and is labeled with a copyright.
It’s a solid orange rectangle.
The artist spent a lot of time on that!
Months to get that perfect shade of orange.
Perhaps more likely years of work with colour and colour theory preceding a quick output of some content? Why the sarcastic tone?
The sarcastic tone is likely because of the price. There is something jarring about such a simple product, even if it was made by an artist with a good eye for color, being behind such a large paywall. Most people find this app, even forgetting “Orange,” to be overpriced, myself included. It should be expected for people to use the most extreme examples to point out the absurdity and to laugh at it, especially when it’s being marketed to the public.
Had this been an app you buy for $10 once, still there would be people like this, but much less. And if it were free, for example, nobody would bat an eye. The outrage is caused by price.
I’m not invested in this debacle at all, really. I just found your lack of understanding interesting. Not trying to offend you by that.
And just the effort of painting every one of those pixels one by one, it’s not like we have some magic tool to fill an image with the same color and call it a day.
Maybe it’s inspired by Rothko
Wallpapers on phone are useless because apps are always full screen.
Who would pay for such thing?
Wasn’t he also behind the redline icon pack (which I do actually like) but yeah subscription for something you can easily find your own images or even just ask an AI to make.
Subscriptions aren’t something I’ll ever buy into software wise and if they are offering an actual service it better be worth the money and give me more than an image.
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.
$50 a year for wallpapers or I could go to wallhaven and get millions for free?
Also you’ll find many of my submissions on wallhaven, created with passion and shared for free, for anyone thinking about moaning about “artists need to make everything a commercial venture that brings them money”.
The “shares its profits with the artists” part is relevant here.
It would almost be cheaper to commission an artist frankly.
If you know an artist doing commissions that cheap they are depressed, desperate, or want to fuck you.
Could just commission someone on Fiverr for an original artwork
But that’s the best type of artist
… why are they always so goddamn hot.
Almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Nah it’d be cheaper to commission the artist for a dozen or so pictures for 45 bucks:
First you need to blow some ungodly amount of money on breaking the time/space barrier… Then travel back to the 1920s and find a starving artist. Then pitch him 45 bucks for some art. Easy! 45 bucks to them is like 800 of our today dollars.
Sarcasm aside- it seems people really are disconnected on how much a commission or art costs. Sure you can buy prints reasonably priced but any commission that isn’t a speedy doodle is going to clock in a helluva lot higher.
I’m an artist who has uploaded many of my works to wallhaven entirely for free online, alongside the games I put out and any other creative venture I’ve pursued over the years.
That part is problematic not relevant.
okay, cool, but I am going to assume you don’t speak for all artists.
No one speaks for all X.
Did he disclose an amount?
5% to artists is very different than 40% to artists.
Or is he adopting the Spotify bottom line?
Only pay artists after X downloads and only pay a few cents after thousands of downloads and use the rest for profits
It’s 50%, which is honestly quite low
50% is quite decent and is 20% higher than most other “decent” services including physical stores. Building and keeping an app up to date with ever changing content requires at least a part time developer which is expensive.
Well the baseline is that most wallpaper apps, which don’t pay artists afaik, charge like $5 a year, so if you’re gonna charge me 50, I expect 90% to go to artists
Use Muzei and either curate your own collection or pull in one of their pre-made ones.
This. Hell you can generate literally endless wallpapers for free.
I started to get worked up but then i remembered I don’t particularly care. He’s in it to make bank, not necessarily sell you a quality product. If he were, he wouldn’t be selling a wallpaper app.
Yeah it seems like a weird thing to get mad about. No one is forcing anyone to pay this guy for his wallpaper app. Keep watching his videos if you enjoy them or don’t. The wallpaper app seems as inconsequential as his DBrand shilling. I watch his reviews every year and I’ve never bought anything from DBrand lol. Mostly because the products look like shit tbh.
That just about sums it up.
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.
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.
