New Delhi: The most popular and well-known YouTuber, Marques Brownlee, has recently announced that he has decided to shut down his own subscription wallpaper application, Panels. Now there are a few users who don’t even know about Panels, which was a wallpaper application where users could download various types of digital wallpapers for their devices for a monthly fee of starting at $11.99 (roughly Rs 1080) a month. But more than a year after facing scrutiny over its price and privacy, Marques Brownlee has told their followers the application would be shut down altogether on 31 December.
He also announced officially in a video that he said, “We made a mistake in making our first application, and ultimately we weren’t able to turn it into the vision that I had.” He also added that he wanted to become a vibrant ecosystem for wallpapers and support the artists who design them. Topping the application download charts at launch and seeing two million wallpaper downloads, calling it a rollercoaster ride. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t able to sustain noting the application niche appeal and audience. Marques Brownlee has previously highlighted the application’s potential limited appeal when responding to criticism of it shortly after it launched.
The target market for this is tiny, and most people don’t download a wallpaper application, he said this thing to users on the X platform. He also thanked the artists who had been involved in creating wallpapers for the application. A notice on the Panels website stated the users would be able to keep purchased or downloaded wallpapers from the application forever and be refunded for any active subscriptions after its closure at the end of the month. They would also be able to create their own spin-offs of the application, as the code behind it would become open source. This will enable anyone to build on what they started. They are now excited to see that the latest projects may grow from it, as written in the notice.
