A new smartphone wallpaper app that costs over 7,000 yen per year has been released
One of the essential things for customizing your smartphone is 'wallpaper'. Beautiful wallpapers are sometimes distributed for free, and sometimes those taken by professional photographers are sold for a fee, but recently a YouTuber has released a wallpaper app that costs up to $50 (about 7,400 yen) per year.
MKBHD to fix his wallpaper app, but not its $50 price tag - Android Authority
The wallpaper app in question is called ' Panels ' and was released by MKBHD (Marques Brownlee), a popular YouTuber and technology reviewer with 19.5 million subscribers. Panels is available for Android and iOS , but both versions have received poor reviews from users. The Android version has been downloaded over 100,000 times.
The app itself is free to download, but to unlock all HD content, you need a subscription for $12 per month (about 1,800 yen) or $50 per year. Initially, you could watch two ads to unlock SD resolution content, but with the update on October 4, 2024, you can now watch one ad to unlock one HD content.
The app store has received negative reviews such as, 'It's crazy to pay 7,000 yen a year or 1,800 yen a month for wallpapers that look like Apple's default wallpapers. How can you justify this cost, which is higher than a Netflix subscription?' and 'For people who are more interested in artists than the wallpapers themselves. Overall, it's mediocre as a wallpaper app, and the only highlight is the startup animation.'
However, MKBHD acknowledged that the target market is very small, saying, 'Most people won't download it. It's for people who have inquired. If you're not interested, don't worry about it.'
In addition to its expensive plan, the app was criticized at the time of its release for having too many ads and for asking for too many permissions, such as collecting users' purchase history, contact information, usage data, location information, IDs, and diagnostic data on the iOS version.
In response to complaints from users, MKBHD said, 'The permissions were proposed by the ad network, and Panels does not see location information, Internet history, etc. The requests are too broad, so we will fix them as soon as possible.' In addition, they have no intention of changing the price, saying, 'We will strive to provide fair value for the premium version.'
Part of building in public is getting mass feedback immediately, which is pretty dope. Almost exactly like publishing a YouTube video
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) September 24, 2024
First thing we're doing is fixing the excessive data disclosures, as people rightfully brought up. For transparency, we'd never actually ask for…
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