Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) announced on Monday that his phone wallpaper app Panels will be shutting down.
Fans had high hopes for Brownlee's entry into the app market, given his reputation as an astute tech reviewer who has amassed over 20 million followers on YouTube. He is so influential that some have blamed his comments about Humane AI and Fisker for those companies' ultimate failures. (We think the real problem is that you shouldn't raise $230 million if you don't have a product.) However, since Brownlee launched Panels in September 2024, the app has struggled to find its own audience.
“We knew it was a niche, but we made mistakes when building our first app and ultimately weren't able to turn it into my vision,” Brownlee said in an interview unlisted video on YouTube. In blog entryhe added that “the composition of the development team has changed” and he could not find suitable collaborators to develop the application.
Brownlee was inspired to create Panels because when he posts video reviews of phones, tablets, and computers, fans always point out how great his wallpapers and lockscreens are. When he first announced the app, he noted that if you typed “where does mkbhd…” into Google, one of the first suggestions would be “…download his wallpapers.”
The panels partnered with artists to sell a variety of high-resolution wallpapers, which users could access for $50 a year or $12 a month (artists received a portion of these fees). But Brownlee couldn't overcome the challenge of trying to create a paid market for something consumers aren't used to paying for – it's easier to just download a photo off the Internet or take a cute photo of your dog.
Brownlee's positioning propelled Panels to No. 1 on the iOS and Google Play photo app charts in its launch month. The app couldn't keep up that pace.
According to app analytics firm Appfigures, the panels achieved approximately 900,000 lifetime downloads and accounted for $95,000 in consumer spending on iOS and Android. Last month, the app was downloaded just 3,000 times and consumer spending was $500, a drop too low to make it to U.S. app stores.
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According to Panels' own information, users have downloaded over 2 million wallpapers from the app.
Panels will begin refunding users for active annual subscriptions after the app officially shuts down on December 31, 2025. However, a post on the Panels blog outlines ways for customers to get their money back more quickly. Panels claims that once the app is closed, all user data will be deleted and the app code will be open sourced for other developers to build on if they so wish.
