YouTuber MKBHD (Marques Brownlee), sparked controversy and backlash after launching ‘Panels,’ a subscription-based, HD wallpaper app for phones.

Bro really tried to sell his subscribers a “50$ a year” subscription to a “wallpaper” app.

Interesting points about the “app”:

  • the app has premium and free wallpapers
  • the free wallpapers are only available in sd quality and if you want hd youd have to subscribe
  • in order to unlock the sd quality you have to watch two 30 second ads.
  • theres a wallpaper called “orange” thats just the color orange
  • tyler@programming.devEnglish
    78·
    1 month ago

    Way more than that.

    • requires crazy permissions like user location
    • wallpapers are in a publicly accessible s3 bucket
    • profit split for wallpaper creators is 50/50 which is worse than most app store splits
    • most of the creators actually seem to be current MKBHD employees
    • app is either built from a template or an old app that they bought

    Source: https://youtu.be/prZ7ZfdFrNs