Marques Brownlee is winding down Panels, the curated wallpaper app he launched under his MKBHD brand, due to a combination of a niche market, team changes, and no longer being able to fully realize what he had wanted for the product. The shutdown caps an audacious effort to create a premium marketplace around lock screen and home screen art.
In a video message and a companion blog post, Brownlee said that the team had been unable to find common ground on the long-term approach.
He also reconfirmed refunds for eligible subscribers and his intention to open-source the app’s code once its service officially shuts down, perhaps offering a chance for other developers to recycle some technology or learn from the project.
What Happened: Why Panels Couldn’t Sustain Momentum
Panels debuted with a no-nonsense pitch: pay for high-resolution, artist-made wallpapers selected by one of the most impactful voices in consumer tech. Interest at launch was intense — the app rocketed to the top of the photo app charts on both iOS and Google Play — thanks to Brownlee’s huge following combined with a long-standing request from fans for the wallpapers that were spotted in his device reviews.
But early momentum didn’t lead to lasting gains. Brownlee admitted that they made some rookie app mistakes, and observed that finding the right team combination had been challenging over time. Even with strong branding and a distinctive aesthetic, Panels struggled to find a long-term paid niche in an area consumers have long come to expect without charge.
The Numbers Behind Panels’ Rise and Decline
Through iOS and Android, Panels had some 900,000 lifetime downloads and approximately $95,000 in consumer spending, estimated by Appfigures. Recent traction had fallen to only a few thousand monthly downloads and hundreds of dollars of spend — levels insufficient to support a premium marketplace.
Panels revealed that the app had downloaded over 2 million wallpapers. Combined, the figures indicate a degree of limited pricing power in this category, with average consumer spend per download running only to a few cents. The bottleneck was conversion and retention, with tiers costing either $12 a month or $50 a year.
For context, free incumbents like Zedge have reported tens of millions of MAUs in investor materials, showing the gravitational pull free discovery and advertising-supported models can create. It’s a scale that is difficult for a paid alternative to take root and flourish, unless the content or utility is demonstrably better.
Monetizing Wallpapers In A World Of Free Options
Wallpapers are plentiful, highly replaceable, and more and more a part of the platforms themselves. Apple’s lock screen customization and theme packs and Google’s generative wallpapers for recent Pixel devices further compress the distance between “good enough” defaults and paid premium packs. Meanwhile, free high-quality images relentlessly churn across social platforms.
Panels’ move was to flip the economics of that decision on its head, working directly in partnership with artists to share revenues and layering curation and quality control on top. The challenge was getting users to see wallpapers as consumable, subscription-worthy content, not just a throwaway commodity. “With default consumer behavior in which people snap screenshots, save, or use features built into the app (even things like text), I feel as if paid conversion rates are ruthless.”
And audience scale, even for a creator as big as Brownlee, is not a perfect one-to-one stand-in for recurring revenue. Spike charts from influencer launches don’t hold up without a strong habit loop, unique utility, or network effects. Panels were visually helpful, but not necessary.
What Users And Artists Can Expect From Panels
Panels says it will refund active annual subscribers and has detailed a process to ensure timely claims in advance of the shutdown. The company says it will delete user data at a local level when the app is fully offline, which could also prevent abuses. Perhaps most importantly, the codebase is open source, meaning developers can take a look for themselves at how the app’s image delivery, licensing logic, and storefront components work.
For participating artists, the wind-down is a reminder of both the potential and precarity of such niche creator marketplaces. Revenue shares present a cleaner path to monetization than scraping or repost culture, but sustainability hinges on steady subscriber growth and clear rationales for paying. Future experiments can include bundles, editioning, or integration with device personalization features to enhance the value proposition.
The Big Picture For Creator Apps After Panels
The trajectory of Panels is a textbook case of the boundaries of influence when there is no product-market fit. The app nailed curation and brand trust but crashed straight into the truth that personalization is a crowded, low-barrier-to-entry space. Native tools and AI generation are added to platforms; there is increasing market price pressure and dependent users overlap. Meanwhile, those with free options can’t beat cost but need a rationale for higher-priced standalones based on functionality not found in the competition.
That said, the open-sourcing move is a positive coda. It turns a sunset into an R&D contribution to the community — and other teams get a blueprint for what worked, what didn’t, and where a premium content marketplace could go next. The point, though, is not that paid personalization can never happen — it just requires more intense differentiation than great art alone.
