MKBHD wallpaper app panels have been turned off

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, or MKBHD, announced Monday that his phone’s wallpaper Panels app will be shutting down.

Fans had high hopes for Brownlee’s foray into app development, given his reputation as a sharp-eyed tech reviewer, and he 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 failure (we think the real issue 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 an audience of its own.

“We knew it was niche, but we made mistakes creating our first app, and in the end, we couldn’t turn it into the vision I had,” Brownlee said in an unlisted YouTube video. He added in a blog post that “the composition of the development team changed,” and he was unable to find the right collaborators to grow the app.

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

The boards collaborated with artists to sell premium, high-resolution wallpapers, which users could access at a cost of $50 per year, or $12 per month (the artists received a share of these payments). But Brownlee couldn’t overcome the challenge of trying to create a paid market for something consumers weren’t accustomed to paying for — it’s easier to pull a photo from the Internet, or take a cute photo of your dog.

Thanks to Brownlee’s standing, Panels ranked first on the iOS and Google Play photo app charts during its launch month. The app was unable to maintain this momentum.

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

As revealed by Panels, users have downloaded more than two million wallpapers from the app.

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