- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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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.
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.
Anish Kapoor strikes again
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!”
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
It costs $49.99 per year (or $11.99 per month)
Why in the hell does the monthly price end with you paying 280% more than the yearly. That is such an absurd discount I don’t even know why someone would pay at all for this app but more so I want to understand where the price justification is and who came up with this plan.
To be clear I support artists and more than welcome a platform for them to share and sell art if they wish… I don’t get why it needs to be a subscription service and I don’t see how such inflated charges are going to help artists as it’ll just discourage large numbers of people wanting to support them.
Short version: there’s an $80 bread maker with 5 features, a $120 bread maker with 12 features, and a $475 bread maker with 14 features.
The $475 bread maker only exists to make the $120 version look like a bargain.
Also the nature of a wallpaper app, maybe you just want to plop in get a wallpaper and scamper off into the sunset.
Matter of fact for the $50 a year price I could sign back up for a month twice a year and still come out on top.
I believe this is called the anchoring effect in psychology, and it’s really effective
Bingo. Major component of persuasive design.
But in the end you get more feature for a higher price. In this case it’s the same app for different prices depending on time frame… not to mention the app has no purpose beyond finding a wallpaper so it only really has 1 feature.
The point is not whether there are more features. The point is to give you an incentive to go yearly, and in this case it’s a huge “discount” even though it’s in no way worth the monthly cost. The monthly plan isn’t meant to sell you the monthly plan. It’s meant to make the yearly plan look good.
I want to understand where the price justification is
The justification is that people should be yearly subscribers when they can more easily forget to cancel it.
Probably because you can pay for a month and download all the wallpapers and cancel.
Who would pay for this?
Marques has a decent chunk of his fan base that’s…kinda rich? That’s the only thing that can explain why he reviews supercars and expects people to use their phone without a case. So if he’s directing some of that fan base’s money toward artists, I’m all for it, assuming the profit sharing is reasonable (and I have no reason to believe it’s not).
I mean, I’m not going to pay that sort of money on a wallpaper (I almost always use photos of family or friends anyway). But if the people who buy it like it, and the people who sell art for it are treated well, you go MKBHD.
I use my phone without a case too, phones don’t break that easily. I even dropped it on stone tiles once when I missed my pocket and it only got a few scratches on the side from that.
There are a lot of people walking around with cracked screens who would seem to disagree.
Skill issue on their part
Im not rich and I use my phone without a case and watch some of those reviews.
The app is a bad idea with a bad deal for artists.
Im not rich and I use my phone without a case
I guess you could also have fairly sticky hands.
and watch some of those reviews.
Yeah, sometimes I do too, if only for the novelty of it. But they’re certainly not for us.
The app is a bad idea with a bad deal for artists.
Citation needed. Do you have any data on the app’s profit share structure? Because at the price they’re charging, if they’re passing on a decent share of it to the artists, it sounds like it’s not a bad gig.
Fifty fifty is what MKB said was the split, which is a predatory figure. Apple charges less and people are up in arms about their predatory practices.
I dont know what the sticky hands comment means.
I dont know what the sticky hands comment means.
I’m not brave enough to use my phone without a case, because I know I’ll drop it. Either you’re braver than me, richer than me, or you have better grip than me.
Fifty fifty is what MKB said was the split, which is a predatory figure.
50% of the revenue or 50% of the profit? Because if they’re paying the artists first and footing the bill for hosting the app out of the other 50%, that’s a pretty good deal.
I just dont like cases and take the risk. Phones are nicer looking without.
He didnt specify which would lead me to believe profits. Neither is a good split, he is charging as much as spotify for content he did not create and keeping half.
I just dont like cases and take the risk. Phones are nicer looking without.
No doubt, but I don’t have that kind of cash to burn on the aesthetics.
Neither is a good split, he is charging as much as spotify for content he did not create and keeping half.
Hosting and maintaining an application actually has some pretty non-trivial cost associated with it. If it’s half of revenue, then MKBHD actually isn’t taking very much at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wallpapers on phone are useless because apps are always full screen.
Who would pay for such thing?
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.
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.
“I hear you”
Corporate PR phrase detected. Product mentally blacklisted
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.
It is probably just a web view, lol
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.
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.
