The Bing Wallpaper app arrived in 2020 as a direct download from the Microsoft website. After four years, it is now available on the Microsoft Store and is still listed on the old page. Bing wallpapers have always looked great and some even find more information about the images.

Michael Schechter, vice president of Bing and Microsoft, shared this news on his official nickname in a rather offbeat way. Instead of a simple announcement, it said: “The Bing Wallpaper app is now available on the Microsoft Store and it doesn’t cost $50 a year. » This is a direct mockery of paid wallpaper apps that cost the said amount and offer high-resolution wallpapers.

The Bing Wallpaper feature is pretty cool and people liked the new launch and the fact that the app has good 4K images. However, some complained about it being a privacy nightmare and how the app introduced a lot of unnecessary pop-ups and redirects on non-Edge browsers.

Windows Latest installed the Bing wallpaper on a Windows 11 PC. We only saw a few wallpaper options and noted that launching the app did nothing. Attempting to launch the application also doesn’t open any windows.

It automatically applies wallpaper and hides in the system tray. When you right-click the tray icon, you can use a previous wallpaper and configure daily wallpaper settings.

It doesn’t have anything extra and doesn’t let you browse a collection of photos, which many wallpaper apps do. We also hate the system tray UI, which doesn’t match Windows 11 at all and looks like an app from a decade ago.

Rafael Rivera, a developer, replied to this sarcastic remark with: “Probably safer to pay $50 than to install it on your machine.” It will automatically install Bing Visual Search and have code to browse and decrypt your Edge and Chrome cookies.

But does this simple wallpaper app do all that?

Bing Wallpaper has built-in tracking

What’s wrong with the Bing Wallpaper app? As Rafael Rivera pointed out, it adds a registry in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\BingWallpaperApp\Switch.

If you write “KILL” here, the application will close itself. While this seems useful, it shows how the app digs deeper into your system, which is unusual for a wallpaper tool.

Opening promotions in Edge is good, but it seems to track cookies in Chrome and Firefox and slowly nag you to switch to Edge and push other random crapware.

The app also hides its settings using strong encryption (AES-256) and a unique code to lock its files. This makes it harder to see what the app is doing.

Over time, it can detect closed browsers like Chrome or Firefox and reopen them with Microsoft ads or promotional tabs. To do this, it uses special add-ons or extensions, such as the one named (protected email) in Firefox.

In short, Bing Wallpaper app is more than just a wallpaper changer.

As shown in the screenshot above, the Bing Wallpaper app also tries to sell you Microsoft Bing and Edge via ads on Windows 11.

More importantly, what’s the point of introducing Bing wallpaper to the Windows 11 Store when Windows Spotlight can already edit desktop photos? Only Microsoft could tell us.