Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, or MKBHD, announced on Monday that his phone wallpaper app Panels is shutting down.
Fans had high hopes for Brownlee’s foray into app development, given his reputation as an eagle-eyed tech reviewer who has amassed more than 20 million followers on YouTube. He’s so influential that some blamed his commentary on Humane AI and Fisker for those companies’ eventual failures. (We think the real issue is that you shouldn’t raise $230 million if you have no product.) Yet from the time Brownlee launched Panels in September 2024, the app struggled to find an audience of its own.
“We knew it was niche, but we made mistakes in making our first app, and ultimately, we weren’t able to turn it into the vision I had,” Brownlee said in an unlisted YouTube video. In a blog post, he added that “the makeup of the development team changed,” and he was unable to find the right collaborators to grow the app.
Brownlee was inspired to create Panels because when he posts video reviews of phones, tablets, and computers, fans always point out how stunning his wallpapers and lock screens are. When he first announced the app, he pointed out that if you type “where does mkbhd …” into Google, one of the first suggestions is “… get his wallpapers.”
Panels partnered with artists to sell distinct, high-resolution wallpapers, which users could access at a cost of $50 per year, or $12 per month (the artists got a cut of those payments). But Brownlee couldn’t overcome the challenge of trying to create a paying market for something that consumers are not accustomed to paying for — it’s easier to just pull an image from the internet, or take a cute photo of your dog.
Thanks to Brownlee’s stature, Panels ranked No. 1 on the iOS and Google Play charts for photos apps during its launch month. The app couldn’t sustain that momentum.
According to the app intelligence firm Appfigures, Panels reached about 900,000 lifetime downloads and $95,000 in consumer spending across iOS and Android. Last month, the app only received 3,000 downloads and $500 in consumer spending, dipping too low to rank on U.S. app stores.
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Per Panels’ own disclosure, users downloaded more than 2 million wallpapers from the app.
Panels will begin to refund users with active annual subscriptions when the app officially shuts down on December 31, 2025. However, Panels’ blog post outlines ways for customers to get their money back quicker. After the app shutdown, Panels says all user data will be deleted, and the app code will be open sourced so other developers can build on it, if they so desire.
