500px is the home of a great deal of lovely photography, and the app has been updated today to be a bit more lovely itself. At least this is the assertion made by 500px. The new v4.3.0 is live in the Play Store with a completely revamped UI and a few small feature additions. However, Chainfire’s 500px wallpaper app 500 Firepaper got an update too, and it’s a much sadder story.
First, the official app—it’s quite a bit different than the old version. You can see some images of that one at the bottom of this post. 500px is mostly white now, but there’s a blue status bar which looks odd to me without a matching action bar. The sections of the app are now accessible with tabs along the top, rather than the old-fashioned drop down menu. On the feature side, there’s a new gallery section where people can create curated lists of photos. Favorites and likes have now been merged into just “likes” as well. One thing that still hasn’t changed is the selection of images for the Android Wear watch face. Come on, guys.
Many people preferred to get their 500px fix in the form of Chainfire’s 500 Firepaper app, but maybe not for much longer. The wallpapers in this app could be set for 24 hours in accordance with 500px’s rules. However, a pro upgrade allowed 7 days of caching for an image. This feature was done in cooperation with 500px, but Chainfire says the 500px folks have taken to watermarking all the images accessed via the API, even for pro users. After some unpleasantness (which you can read about in more detail), 500 Firepaper is now free with no pro upgrade. Chainfire suspects the app’s API access will be cut off at some point, so enjoy it while you can.
So, it’s quite a day for 500px on Android, and not an entirely good one.
The old app