Panels (MKBHD)

» see panels.art as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i was never going to pay fifty dollars a year for phone wallpapers. that is the honest summary of my relationship to panels. i own a stock-android phone with the manufacturer's wallpaper picker and a folder of screenshots. the product panels was trying to build was for a different kind of user, and marques brownlee's own audience turned out to be smaller inside that user than his subscriber count suggested.

panels launched in september 2024 as a joint product from marques brownlee studios, the media company brownlee runs alongside his youtube channel. the pitch was curated, exclusive-license, high-resolution wallpapers from a rotating list of visual artists. brownlee's twenty-million-subscriber channel drove the launch week. panels went to number one in the photos category on both stores. app tracking data later showed roughly nine hundred thousand lifetime downloads and around ninety-five thousand dollars in consumer spending across both platforms.

at launch the app took heat for the price point and for what critics called aggressive data collection. brownlee posted a follow-up video within days addressing both, agreed to trim the tracking, and left the pricing in place. the audience never really came back after that first week. by november 2025 monthly download volume was down to around three thousand and monthly revenue was around five hundred dollars.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

panels sold a subscription to a curated wallpaper library. artists uploaded high-resolution art and panels reviewed and licensed it. subscribers browsed and downloaded, and the artist share came out of subscription revenue. this was not a novel model. lockscreen wallpaper apps have existed on both stores since the early 2010s. the specific bet was that brownlee's editorial voice plus a paid model would carry the app past the free competition.

the bet failed on the fundamental of the category. wallpaper is a market where free is the default. installing an app to browse and pay for something that free hosts like unsplash and the manufacturer's own preset picker already give away without an account was a hard ask, and the panels team never found the shape of user for whom the ask made sense at scale.

~ the day it died ~

brownlee posted the shutdown notice on 1 december 2025 in a blog post and a companion video. the app would stop working on 31 december 2025. anyone with an active annual subscription would get a prorated refund. wallpapers already downloaded stayed on the device. all remaining server-side user data would be deleted after the shutdown. the app code would be open-sourced afterwards for anyone who wanted to build on it.

the video was frank about the reasons. brownlee said the team could not turn panels into the vision he had for it, and that the makeup of the development team had changed enough that he had not found the right collaborators to grow the app. by youtube standards this was a shutdown announcement with unusually little spin. the video went up and brownlee moved on.

~ the funny part ~

panels is one of the cleanest data points in the argument about creator products. a top-tier tech youtuber with twenty million subscribers and a real media company behind him could not sustain a fifty-dollar-a-year subscription app in a mature category. the audience that watches brownlee's videos is not automatically the audience that buys his subscription products, and the funnel from one to the other is much narrower than the raw numbers suggest.

the launch-week chart position is the misleading part of the story. app stores rank on velocity, not on retention. peaking at number one for photos in september 2024 was a marketing win that never converted into a sustaining base. panels ran for fifteen months on the difference between those two numbers before the difference caught up with it.

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