A $50 App That Sells Free Wallpaper? YouTuber MKBHD Is Making Bank—And Angry Fans

One entertaining thing about social media is it’s become way easier for critics to get criticized in public. Marques Brownlee, the YouTube influencer and tech reviewer known as MKBHD, is learning this the hard way after launching his new mobile wallpaper app, called Panels.

People are hating it. Loudly. The app, which was launched as part of Brownlee's iPhone 16 review video, is awash in a flood of criticism from fans over its pricing, data collection, and perceived general skeeziness.

Panels is designed to offer a curated selection of "stunning full resolution wallpapers" from digital artists. However, the subscription model—$49.99 per year or $11.99 per month—is alienating many among Brownlee’s 19 million-plus followers.

The pricey Panels collection includes one that is nothing more than a solid orange background (good for Halloween, maybe?); another is a pixelated piano and a flat image of a tiny person walking on a blue background.

Screenshots from MKBHD's wallpaper app, Panels. Image: Decrypt

The negative reactions in Brownlee's comment section were… abundant, apparently topping 13,000 replies within the first 20 hours. People didn’t really seem to care about the new iPhone, but they really wanted to know what he was thinking about when he contrived the price structure for his app.

"No one's paying $50 a year for a regular wallpaper app lil bro," user MrUnknownXD commented to the tune of more than 25,000 likes. “I wonder how insanely out of touch you have to be to think a $50/yr subscription for a wallpaper app is a good idea,” said another commenter.

One dude was so incensed he even wrote a script and put it in Github so people can download all the wallpaper backgrounds for free: "Took me 26 minutes to write this after reverse engineering the app. Enjoy!"

https://x.com/kaepora/status/1838651348797063276?s=46

Undeterred, Brownlee, who has previously ventured into product creation—most notably through collaborations with Ridge and Atoms—emphasized that Panels was built “from scratch.” The wallpaper is “all made by artists who can choose to involve AI or not in their creation process," Brownlee explained to a user questioning the app's value. Plus, Brownlee pointed out that half of the revenue (after Apple takes its 30% cut) would go to the wallpaper artists.

So far, the app has been downloaded over 10,000 times on Android and is the second most-downloaded app in Apple’s Photo and Video section (which doesn’t provide download numbers). A free download does not mean that someone then purchased a subscription, but it’s a public stat worth following—so let’s do some back of the envelope math:

With just 10,000 people subscribing, he'd make around $500k a year, and at the higher end, if 1.9 million people—10% percent of his base—subscribed, then he'd made nearly $10 million per year.

MKBHD said he takes 50% of the revenue and gives 50% to the artists. So, that $10 million would be split up between the App Stores who would get $3 million, then $3.5 million for MKBHD and collaborators, and finally $3.5 million split between artists featured in the app.

Not a bad haul for an orange backdrop.

Besides the price structure, users also shared concerns about the huge amounts of data that Panels is collecting before letting users download jpegs. The list includes location, contact info, local IP address, device model, cookies, local addresses, and more.

Brownlee tried to calm the waters, pointing out that there’s a free tier for deadbeats; of course, they would need to watch two unskippable ads before downloading a single file in lower resolution. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

He also promised updates for those who subscribed—which also played against his own reputation, as he is known to recommend buying products for their current value and not for what they promise. That was a key point that led him to call the AI Humane pin the worst product he has ever covered.

Smart people learn from their mistakes of course, and Brownlee didn’t get to be Big Man on YouTube without smarts. He quickly acknowledged the negative feedback and promised that the team is working to address the "excessive data disclosures" and "dial back ad frequency" for the free version of the app.

However, he doubled down on the $50 yearly subscription plan. "As far as pricing, I hear you! It's our own personal challenge to work to deliver that kind of value for the premium version," he tweeted. He also promised that the Panels app will "be pretty consistently improving over time."

Perhaps a red background is in the works? We can only dream.

Edited by Josh Quittner and Andrew Hayward