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.
$50 a year for wallpapers or I could go to wallhaven and get millions for free?
The wallpapers are nice but the website is hideous and unusable.
Edit: typo
Which side?
Typo, my bed
(intentional this time, it’s late)
Good night😴
the website is hideous and unusable
huh?
Used it on desktop, had to create account, even after that kept giving me errors that i need an account…
Use Muzei and either curate your own collection or pull in one of their pre-made ones.
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.
But that’s the best type of artist
… why are they always so goddamn hot.
Could just commission someone on Fiverr for an original artwork
One piece digitally drawn in an hour or two maybe. Otherwise it is likely premade, generated, or not their source. Yeah- if you are talking backgrounds for a phone they could be more abstract or start with a base but for 45 bucks? That buys you an hour or two of that artists time- three if they like the idea or you.
Fiverr is the worst. They enable abusive clients to find victims, and AI con artists to find marks.
So that sounds exceptionally awful. You have any more info on that?
There’s also this infamous story. And also this one. I recognize that anecdote is not the singular of data, but there’s a pretty substantial paper trail on Fiverr.
For a single piece sure.
I presume the idea here is that you have access to their full library. Personally, I fail to see why I would change my wallpaper enough to warrant even a free app to change it, let alone 50 bucks.
Just use a free wallpaper app and pay a random artist 25 bucks
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
This. Hell you can generate literally endless wallpapers for free.
Here’s his wallpaper: MKBSD
The highrises are by Chris Hytha, a pretty cool dude whose work I do enjoy.
looks like shit thanks 🙏👍
Whose website is this? Many of these look like Justin Maller’s (IG)
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
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.
Homie spreads apple propaganda like aids, he’s an awful tech influencer
He is quite harsh on Apple for someone who gets exclusive access. In this video he is talking about how nothing has changed, barely considered an update and that the new things dont even come with the phone.
MKBD covers all major manufacturers at this point. Unless you want him to say that Apple sucks, don’t see what the complaint is?
What? He’s in the pocket of all the major OEMs. He’s had zero credibility for years because of this, but he’s never been more deferential to Apple than he has been to Samsung or Google.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, that was a cash cow for a few years and now everybody has their phone on vibrate.
Crazy Frog itensifies
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 rich kid Danny. He plays the songs that remind him of the good times and sings the songs that remind him of the better times. Oh Danny Boy, Danny Boy, Danny Boy
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.
I’ve never liked this guy, he just always felt like a smarmy asshole each time I tried to watch him and he shilled Apple stuff way too hard for my liking. Blocked his channel and several channels that collabed with him and was mostly able to ignore his existence. Doing something shitty like this kinda adds confirmation to my perceptions of him. What an out of touch douche move.
“I hear you”
Corporate PR phrase detected. Product mentally blacklisted
Haven’t watched him in forever. Has he reached full money grab?
deleted by creator
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.
“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.
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.
$48.99, the lowest I’ll go for you my friend
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
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!”
If I want a unique wallpaper I go on a walk in the great outdoors and take a picture
most unique things outdoors are photographed already
So it makes sense to spend $50 a year on some pictures of those things that are already photographed?
I’m not sure how many times the things you’re taking a picture of has been photographed matters even slightly.
So? Photography is fun. My photos don’t exist until I take them.
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.
Wallpapers on phone are useless because apps are always full screen.
Who would pay for such thing?
50/50 cut is borderline predatory. It should be 30/70. It feels like marques is so out of touch with common people.
30% is still predatory imo. Especially for a glorified marketplace with an image delivery system.
He is fronting money for development. Which is not cheap.
Once dev cost stabilizes, I would love to have a better split for artists.
It is probably just a web view, lol
Dev cost is less than you’d think. And lowering costs when you make an app that’s meant to generate money for you? That will never happen.
Spoken like a true non-developer.
