Brownlee offered some modest praise in announcing the shutdown, noting that his app reached 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 wasn’t enough to build a business, it turns out. ,“Earlier this year, the makeup of the development team changed, and despite our best efforts to bring on colleagues who shared our passion and vision, we were unable to find the right fit,” they wrote. “Rather than keep the app going without being able to develop it the way we originally envisioned, we felt it was best to clean it up.”
Panels had a frustrating vibe from the beginning, given that the business model was to charge people $50 per year (or $12 per month) to get access to high-resolution wallpapers for their phones — a thing you can do for free with literally any of your photos. The free version of the app allowed users to access low-quality images and required them to watch advertisements before downloading anything.
The project ran into some issues at launch due to the amount of data reportedly being collected, asking users for permission to access their location, usage data, and personally identifying information – none of which was felt necessary to operate the wallpaper app. MKBHD was quite receptive to feedback and tried to make changes as the project progressed, but it’s hard to recover from a cash and data grab at launch, especially when there’s no clear market for the app in the first place.
TechCrunch notes that, according to data collected by AppFigures, Panels has had a total of approximately 900,000 downloads since launch and generated approximately $95,000 in purchases on iOS and Android. This wouldn’t be bad for a side project, but it’s not a very good conversion rate for a guy who has over 20 million subscribers on YouTube and six million followers on Xx. Low sales also made the proposal of revenue splitting less attractive to the artists who provided exclusive wallpapers for the project. What’s almost half of zero, anyway?
So by the end of the month, the panels will be gone forever. Brownlee said that if anyone wanted to attempt this task they would open-source the code, although it is unclear why anyone would do so. Idea It is possible Back in the early 2010s, when custom wallpapers felt like a more novel experience, and creating an app constituted an entire business. Perhaps Brownlee could modernize his pitch a bit and rebrand it as a generative AI tool for creating wallpapers, then he could maybe raise a few million from VC dopes instead of trying to monetize his audience.
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