You really don’t want to pay for a wallpaper app

Hadlee Simons / Android Authority

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee (known as MKBHD) released a wallpaper app last week, and it received a negative reception due to its $12/month subscription (or $50 a year). This fee gives you access to a variety of high-quality wallpapers, although there’s also an ad-supported free tier that dishes out lower-quality versions of these wallpapers.

We asked readers on our website and viewers on our YouTube channel how much they were willing to spend on a wallpaper app. It turns out the vast majority of you really don’t want to pay for a wallpaper app in the first place.

Over 8,800 votes were cast on the YouTube poll, and 84% of respondents said they wouldn’t pay for a wallpaper app at all. Meanwhile, over 6,100 votes were tallied on our website, and 78% of surveyed readers said they wouldn’t pay for a wallpaper app.

Many comments on both our website and YouTube channel point to the vast amount of free wallpapers out there. Some users noted sources such as their own photos, Reddit, Twitter, AI image generators, and Google Image Search (although this isn’t ideal if you want ethically sourced wallpapers).

We should also mention our weekly Wallpaper Wednesday series, featuring wallpapers by readers and the AA team. Either way, there’s certainly no shortage of ways to get free backgrounds.

Just 12% of surveyed YouTube viewers said they’d pay a reasonable one-time fee for a wallpaper app, while 15% of polled website readers said they’d pay a one-time fee. In fact, the $4 Wallpaper Engine app was referenced a few times across our website and YouTube channel. So there’s a contingent of people who aren’t opposed to coughing up some cash.

Needless to say, there was very little support for a subscription of any kind. The most popular subscription choice among YouTube voters was $1 to $5 a month, but this only accounted for 2% of the vote. The most popular choice among website visitors was the $1 to $5 tier as well, with 6% of the vote.

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