RIP to MKBHD’s Controversial Digital Wallpaper App

Last year, Marques Brownlee, better known by his YouTube handle MKBHD, decided to exit the influencer/commentator section and enter the arena of apps, only to quickly learn that it sucks. Now he’s leaving. The creator announced that his subscription wallpaper app, Panels, will be shutting down on December 31 after failing to carve out an audience of people willing to pay for images to appear on their homescreen.

Brownlee got off a couple of humblebrags in the shutdown announcement, noting that his app shot to the top spot in the Photos category in the iOS App Store when it first launched in September 2024 and ultimately had more than two million wallpapers downloaded by users. But that was not enough to make a business, it turns out. “Earlier this year, the makeup of the development team changed, and despite our best efforts to bring in collaborators who shared our passion and vision, we weren’t able to find the right fit,†he wrote. “Rather than keeping the app running without being able to grow it in the way we originally envisioned, we felt it was best to make a clean break.â€

Panels had a doomed vibe from the very start, considering the business model was to charge people $50 per year (or $12 per month) to gain access to high-resolution wallpapers for their phone—a thing that you can do for free with literally any of your own photos. The free version of the app allowed users to access lower-quality images and required them to watch ads before downloading anything.

The project also took some heat for the amount of data it was allegedly collecting at launch, asking users for permission to access their location, usage data, and personally identifying information—none of which seemed essential to operating a wallpaper app. MKBHD was pretty receptive to the feedback and tried to make changes as the project went on, but it’s hard to recover from the appearance of being a cash and data grab at launch, especially when there isn’t a clear market for the app in the first place.

TechCrunch notes that, according to data collected by Appfigures, Panels had about 900,000 total downloads since its launch and generated about $95,000 in purchases across iOS and Android. That wouldn’t be bad for a side project, but it’s not a great conversion rate for a guy who had an audience of more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube and six million followers on X. The low sales also made the proposition of revenue splits for artists who provided exclusive wallpapers to the project less appealing. What’s half of almost nothing, anyway?

So by the end of the month, Panels will be gone for good. Brownlee said they will be open-sourcing the code in case anyone wants to try to pick up the mantle, though it’s not clear why anyone would. The idea might have played in the early 2010s, when custom wallpapers would feel like a more novel experience, and making an app constituted an entire business. Perhaps Brownlee can modernize his pitch a bit and rebrand it as a generative AI tool for creating wallpapers, then he can probably raise a few million off it from VC dopes instead of having to try to monetize his audience.