MKBHD Panels wallpaper app is closing

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, or MKBHD, announced Monday that his phone’s 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 critic who has amassed more than 20 million followers on YouTube. He’s so influential that some have 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 don’t have a product). However, by the time Brownlee launched Panels in September 2024, the app was struggling to find an audience of its own.

“We knew it was niche, but we made mistakes making our first app and ultimately couldn’t turn it into the vision I had,” Brownlee said in a unlisted YouTube video. In one blog posthe added that “the composition of the development team changed” and he was unable to find the right partners to develop the app.

Brownlee was inspired to create Panels because when he posts video reviews for phones, tablets and computers, his fans always point out how impressive his wallpapers and lock screens are. When he first was announced app, he pointed out that if you type “where does mkbhd…” into Google, one of the first suggestions is “…get his wallpapers”.

The panels partnered with artists to sell individual high-resolution wallpapers, which users could access at a cost of $50 per year or $12 per month (artists received a cut of these payments). But Brownlee couldn’t overcome the challenge of trying to create a payment market for something consumers aren’t used to paying for — it’s easier to just grab an image from the internet or snap a cute photo of your dog.

Thanks to Brownlee’s stature, Panels took the #1 spot on the iOS and Google Play charts for photo apps in its month of release. The application could not sustain this momentum.

According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Panels reached about 900,000 lifetime downloads and $95,000 in consumer spending on iOS and Android. Last month, the app received only 3,000 downloads and $500 in consumer spending, falling too low to rank in US app stores.

According to Panels’ own disclosure, users have downloaded more than 2 million wallpapers from the app.

Panels will begin refunding users with active annual subscriptions when the app officially shuts down on December 31, 2025. However, Panels’ blog post describes ways customers can get their money faster. After the app is shut down, Panels says all user data will be deleted and the app’s code will be open source so other developers can build on it if they wish.