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.
Disingenuous shill. He’s been a famous youtuber for years. He knows how consumers think despite getting all of his shit sent to him for free. There’s no way in hell he thought this would work out. “I hear you” Oh do you, Markass Brownlee? You heard all of the noise that people think it’s bullshit that you want to sell $50/year subscriptions for jpegs? What kind of philanthropic or based follow up do you have planned to capitalize on all of this newfound SEO?
Youtubers really don’t have to answer to anyone. He loses nothing by launching this app, and he gains a whole lot of new eyes and ears coming to his channel. He’ll find a way to humanize himself through this and new viewers will click sub because he’ll appear super down to Earth. New subs = more sponsorships.
I don’t understand why the internet is unable to say “I don’t like this app, so I won’t pay for it” rather than “I don’t like this app, so you’re a bad person”. Hundreds of people raging over and catastrophising something they never bought or even heard of until now.
Because it’s blatant consumer exploitation. Just because the Latin phrase “caveat emptor” exists, doesn’t mean that it’s a challenge for every scummy youtuber to launch a shite app in order to fleece their subscribers. This is literally the free market in action. The consumers are making their voices heard. I’ve never understood the mentality of “don’t like it, ignore it”. No. It actively undermines the work other people on YT have done to legitimize the platform.
Who’s being exploited? It’s not like the app hides its true nature until you pay. People are upset at the idea of paying it something they don’t want to but that’s a completely imaginary scenario, those who think it’s good will pay for it and those who don’t won’t. I don’t think that justifies calling the guy names and assuming how he must’ve become (or has always been) a bad person.
I’ve no idea what you mean by legitimacy of YouTube, but if you think things like this hurt it wouldn’t it help to not have a big outrage that makes it reach even more people? Let it have a quiet death and maybe the media will stop creating these weekly how-dare-you-make-a-bad-product dramas
See these people as entertainment and not as reviewers, influencers. They are not more than entertainment companies.
Secondly, I don’t see him as the dev of the app. I don’t know which company dev it and he put his name on it. This brings us to the cut. 50 artist, 25 him, 25 dev company. Without him, the dev company has no chance.
If I’m looking my definition, it looks like a scam.
I think I would like the idea (and at first this my understanding) if you could buy one wallpaper for $1 (or a pack of few for $3) and the 70-90% would go to the artist. Also app would have to limit tracking to just some basic stuff. I know you can get wallpapers free, but supporting something that looks great on your screen would be a nice option.
Of course subscription service for this is mad.
This guy is no different than every other smarmy “Tech Reviewer” on YT. His reviews have been borderline useless for the last few years. This is just the next logical step that these guys take - hitch themselves onto a tech accessory or app and charge their followers predatory prices - fuck this guy.
Here’s his wallpaper: MKBSD
Whose website is this? Many of these look like Justin Maller’s (IG)
looks like shit thanks 🙏👍
Calling them underwhelming is an overstatement. I can find at least 50 better ways to burn my money.
This professional guy shares handmade wallpaper for free.
wallbase/wallhaven as well
The highrises are by Chris Hytha, a pretty cool dude whose work I do enjoy.
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.
Regarding Wallpaper Engine on KDE Plasma, since I switched to Linux a few days ago: here is the repo for the one KDE Wallpaper Plugin i found that worked fine on Nobara. Subscribe to the Wallpapers in Steam, point the plugin to the steam library, done. just know that there are some wallpapers not working yet, which makes plasmashell crash, but no biggie, change the wallpaper and restart plasmashell again.
I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. You have to ask yourself a question: is offering an expensive upfront subscription for an evolving product an endorsement of assessing future value into your purchase. In my view, it isn’t and it’s not what he’s saying.
What he is saying is that to the minority who will find this a good value or who are okay donating to help them implement new features, go ahead and hit that button. Then separately he’s saying “the price will make more sense to more people as features are added” which is true but is not an endorsement of paying the current price for those promised features. At least from what’s in the article and what I’ve seen.
It’s the difference between saying that you should buy Minecraft because it will become an awesome game one day versus saying you should buy Minecraft because it’s either worth it to you now or you’re okay with helping to fund the development of future features you’ll receive. Those are very different.
Also Minecraft is a good example of why his argument is shit as that started off at a low price and increased as it became more complete
You’ve just showed me why my point works. If you buy in now, your early purchase of Minecraft becomes more valuable over time as stuff is added. Therefore, buying now is better than buying later.
Whereas with his app, it’s overpriced now and will add features until that value proposition is met for more people. That discourages you from buying it and there’s no reason to buy it. Especially since it’s a subscription.
Now could he have done the Minecraft model? Yes. And since it’s a subscription, the price can go up slowly with no benefit to early adopters. I think the main reason he didn’t do that is because changing pricing this way generally doesn’t go well.
Minecraft was already awesome when I purchased it in 2011, I didn’t have to get promised vague future features.
I agree. But that’s a subjective stance obviously. I think since Minecraft was priced appropriately for its current value, there was no need to consider future value increasing. And on that basis they could have sold the game for more and chose not to. Still the point is that even if most people didn’t consider it, it incentivizes early purchases. If it were priced at the 1.0 build price at alpha launch, only die hard supporters would have bought it. Everyone else would wait. Same thing here.
“curated wallpapers” including random generated stuff, and “shares profits” on a 50/50 basis, for a shitty app developed by what looks like three fivers in a trench coat.
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.
That’s what patreon is for.
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.
I agree, although i DID spend 5€ on wallpaper engine and i am very happy with it. (just know that our chinese friends are using the steam workshop for WPE to upload/download porn because most porn sites are great-firewalled lol, so take care regarding your filter settings)
I actually do have WPE… it was in a bundle one time, so I got it for free. Tried it once, but I’m conceptually not a fan of running extra software on my gaming PC to run fancy wallpapers.
Supposedly it’s not TOO power hungry and can turn itself off when gaming. How’s your experience been with that?
I’m currently running 2 displays at 1080p (one HDMI, one DP) on a 3070TI. Idle TDP with just plain color is 37-40W, 2 different scenes with features like audio reactivity and mouse input @15FPS are 55-60W. They get paused automatically when a window is maximized (per display), the secondary display pauses additionally when i run a fullscreen/borderless window on the main display.
It is absolutely useless eye candy. I love it lol
ETA: They DO have over 15000 curated wallpapers, if you stick to that you can avoid the questionable content easily. if you look at it from this perspective, that’s worth the price of a small meal.
“I hear you”
Corporate PR phrase detected. Product mentally blacklisted
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.
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.
I’ve not looked into it, but it’s probably pitched as a feel-good way of supporting artists.
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
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.
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.
Anish Kapoor strikes again
Maybe it’s inspired by Rothko
Could be, the man was a fucking genius hi created some of my personal favourite paintings.
Was that your point?
The artist spent a lot of time on that!
That is a measure of exactly nothing.
https://www.nme.com/photos/30-minutes-or-less-19-famous-songs-written-at-staggering-speed-1422651
Your post makes it very clear that you have little experience in the creative world. There is no linear measure of successs or quality. You do a great disservice to those toiling with their creativity by making comments such as this one. We need artists, they are fragile things and should be treated with care.
I didn’t start this post planning to get hetup but I do feel that taking umbrage to your comment is fair, if not tautological.
I would encourage you to labour over a still life or wrestle a passable rendition of your favourite guitar riff. Try sing the first phrase of your favourite song in key. Trust me: none of those things are easy.
If you don’t like “Orange” then just look at something else and hold your tongue.
Yes your comment is tautological.
I feel this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but if you want unique wallpapers, consider paying an actual artist, instead of an influencer
If I want a unique wallpaper I go on a walk in the great outdoors and take a picture
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Avoid sites like Fiver, though. Lots of AI bullshit pretending to be real art.
Even before the flood of AI bullshit Fiverr really, really sucked for the human artists, creatives, coders, and other freelancers employed through the platform.
I made a Fiverr account once for my art services. I deleted it within an hour of creation after reading how much money they would steal from my commissions.
I don’t think that’s going to be an unpopular opinion around here. Maybe a little tricky in the logistics of distinguishing between an artist and influencer and finding an artist who you like and can pay for a phone background, but other than that you’re not going to find many Lemmings saying “no, pay an influencer!”
