Launching Panels: Lessons from a Wallpaper App Mistake

Panels aims to become a go-to wallpaper app while addressing pricing and user experience feedback.

### Transparency and Updates on the Launch of Panels: A Wallpaper App
* 📱 Last week, I launched a wallpaper app called Panels, but I made several mistakes, particularly in **not clearly explaining the app's purpose and pricing structure**, which led to **disappointment among users**.
* 💬 The app targets a niche market, as most people typically use personal photos for wallpapers, but I created it to provide a **centralized resource for the wallpapers** I often get asked about in my content.
* 🖼 Panels features hundreds of pieces from handpicked artists, and users can explore more from each artist directly through the app, aiming to **support both free and paid art collections**.
* 💵 I acknowledged that the app's pricing was poorly communicated; the intention was for it to be **primarily free**, with an **ad-supported option for high-resolution downloads** and a **subscription model for power users**.
* 🎨 The app splits profits with artists **50/50**, allowing them to also sell their work independently, and I emphasized the importance of **creating a platform for discovering new artists**.
* 🔒 Regarding privacy concerns, I clarified that the app **does not track users' locations** and that it can be used **without an account**, addressing initial blunders in our disclosures.
* 🔧 I am aware of the constructive feedback regarding the app's design and functionality, and we are committed to making improvements based on user input, including **regular updates and new art drops every Friday**.
* 🌟 Ultimately, I hope to earn back users' trust through **transparency and ongoing enhancements**, ensuring Panels becomes a **valuable resource for wallpaper enthusiasts**.

So last week, I launched a project that I was really excited about, that we've been working on for a while: a wallpaper app called Panels. And I made a lot of mistakes along the way, including the fact that I didn't really explain anything. I didn't explain the UI, what was in it, the point of the app, and most importantly, why it had a freaking $50 price tier. And so appropriately, the entire internet was very disappointed, and that's 100% on me. I think that that's part of what can happen when you spend a long time building something, that you forget that other people don't have that context. But the point of this video is not to make excuses; it's to actually break down and explain everything so that you have it straight from me. Now, first of all, and I'll get to pricing in a second, but just right from the top, a wallpaper app: pretty niche thing, right? Like, most people just use one of their own pictures as a wallpaper or grab something cool from Google. That's something I've done many times.

over the years, so it's a very small fraction of people who will actually download an app, let alone pay for a wallpaper on their phone. But the reason I decided to try and make a wallpaper app is because for years, I've been answering this one very common question, which is, Where'd you get that wallpaper? Like in videos and screens and devices I'm reviewing, Where'd you get that piece? And so if I could always have some place to point to that's on iOS and Android, if I could have a link in every description, then that would be awesome. And if I can leverage this incredible platform you guys have given me to give way more eyeballs to the artists that make that art that I'm using, I felt like that was something worth building. It's actually an idea that's been floating around the studio for years, and we never really knew where to start. But then, like a year and a half ago, a developer reached out to us with a similar idea, and we were like, All right, this is great, let's

collaborate and let's actually build this thing. So, that's when we set off to actually start making it so many months ago. Myself and a developer team of two, along with some others on my team here at the studio, set off to build this thing. And this is what we ended up with. It's a fresh new app. There's a few hundred pieces in here by a bunch of different handpicked artists that I've used art from in the past, plus a few people in the studio here submitting their own. And then on any page, if you like it, you can get it, but you can also click on the artist name and see more from that person, including their socials. So, this is something specific that sets it apart. Now again, most people, like 99%, 99.9% of humans, do not buy wallpapers. But there is a pretty awesome community of artists making sick art, sometimes free, sometimes a few bucks. I know from being in the thick of it for many years, I've personally gotten very used to fking around and finding a sick

wallpaper or icon pack and go straight to the source, and it's a few bucks, and you download it straight from there. And we wanted to support both of those in this app: free art and paid art. So this is where a lot of the pricing conversation comes in, and this was a misjudgment on my part. Like, this is also terribly communicated, so I want to make super clear: this should be a free app. This should be a great free app experience for the vast majority of people who use it, and I really dropped the ball there. And obviously, I've never made an app before. I make videos and review products, but the people are right. Like, if I was reviewing this app, I would not have been very nice. But this is the two-sided coin of, you know, deciding to not go build something in public. If we're going to dish it, we got to be able to take it too. And so there has been no shortage of tons of actually constructive feedback that we've taken in, taken notes on, and sort

of started to turn into this app that we had pictured in our heads. We're sort of dialing in what we actually want to make, but hey, a lot of people have a lot of questions now. So for the sake of transparency, let me just go over the biggest questions, give you the answers to those questions, and then some of the biggest updates that we've made so far. So number one, pricing. Nobody wants to pay that much for wallpapers. Totally get it. And there are so many reasons why we failed on the price front. So three steps that we're taking here. So first of all, just to bring it back, a wallpaper app is niche. Paying for a wallpaper is even more niche. And so like a subscription to wallpapers is something that I think less than 1% of 1% of people would ever even consider. So if you're looking at panels and find yourself thinking, This seems crazy, paying for a wallpaper, you're not wrong. You are most people. So our first priority is we want to make

Sure, the free experience of the app is great. It's got to be way better, so I'm getting rid of those third-party in-feed ads. This is one of my misjudgments; like, we just don't need those. They feel cheap, and they're also harder to attribute to specific artists anyway. So now, the feed is clean, and then all non-collection wallpapers are available for free in 1080P, no ads. And if you want the full res, sometimes 4K, sometimes 8K, depending on the art, you can get a full-resolution version with a single 30-second ad to try to offset server costs and pay artists. So if you really want it for a high-res tablet or a computer wallpaper or some big screen in your life, then you can get all of it, any of it, for free now. Even though subscriptions are incredibly unpopular, we wanted to at least offer one that made sense for the wallpaper power user, for how few of you actually exist. So first of all, we have a new tier that is

two bucks a month, which is everything I just mentioned, completely ad-free and full resolution, everything across the board. So, that means you never have to see another ad, never have to worry about that, and you always get the highest resolution version, no matter what screen you're downloading for. I think this is really fair and should hopefully continue to help pay to keep the app running as well. Secondly, we also offer, for those of you who are really into this world, like I said earlier, we support paid art collections, is what they're called. So, there are artists who have really gone out of their way to put a ton of work in on certain pieces they've made and have decided to charge for those collections of pieces. Totally cool. There's a whole world of those too. So, if you're using panels and you jump in and decide to buy one single collection for three, four, five bucks, or whatever, that's cool. But if there's a bunch of these that you really like, we wanted to give people an option to just unlock literally everything. So, that's

panels plus so you can subscribe, and for 12 bucks, it unlocks literally every single collection in the whole app, plus anything premium that gets added while you're a subscriber. I think as of right now, that entire value of every artist's paid packs, if you paid them individually, is about 100 bucks, even before any new art drops. So we settled that $12 because that's around what it would cost if you were purchasing more than two collections straight up. And then in case you're someone who really loves to change your wallpaper, say you're a tech reviewer or something, or you have a whole bunch of devices, then you know you're already going to commit to this for more than a few months. We wanted to give people the option to just pay for panels Plus for a year, and we made that 50 bucks. So I think that nets to the equivalent of like roughly $4 a month. But that's the point of why that exists, and I understand that most people will still find forever the $50 number crazy because it's for power users, and it

seems crazy, but if you happen to be one of those power users, then that's why this tier exists. So at least now you know why. And the third important point is that we're splitting profits with the artist 50/50. This is something I mentioned in the original video, and there's a lot of initial discussion around if this is fair. I think it is. I base this on, to be totally honest, on YouTube, which actually I believe theirs is 45/55, but I did 50/50 to be simple. But the idea is the same, which is that hopefully this whole thing can bring a bunch of extra eyes to the art, the same way YouTube drives to. Frankly, there's another thing I'm open to changing. Like, we've set it at that and now are collecting as much information as we can, but I'll be in touch with artists about that too. I do think it's worth noting that this is the main point of the app. Like, this is what I hope it can be, which is a platform for discovering new

artists and what they make. And I haven't told anyone this, but I might as well. The artist agreements that we've made, none of them have any exclusivity at all in them, which means they can. Artists can host the exact same art and stuff on their own website. So, if you find a piece from watching a video or whatever, you go into panels, and then you find their socials, and then go find a whole bunch more stuff from that artist, and go buy a bunch of that without the 50/50 split. I still consider that a win for everyone involved. So, number two, privacy. What is going on with all that tracking? Great question. A lot of people have been rightfully concerned with the one sheeter that the App Store shows, which at launch showed this huge list of things the app might track, which included things like location and tracking across apps. Another blunder by us. This was way too broad for clarity. This was not actually the set of permissions that the app would ask for. The app would never once ask for your

location. It's actually a list of things that you, as a developer, provide to the app store for things that the app may at some point ask, just to tell people ahead of time, just to be safe. And we just checked way too many boxes, so for transparency, most of these boxes were checked because of broad suggestion from the ad service, AdMob. We erred on the side of just leaving them all there to be safe, but that was a dumb choice, no other way to say it. So, to be clear, I do not want your data. Actually, you can use the app without ever logging in, like you don't even need to give us so much as an email address to actually use it and get a wallpaper and save a wallpaper. Like, obviously, you need to make an account to sync across devices and stuff like that, but yeah, that was my B on the disclosures, and that's been fixed. So, number three, it's a bad app. So, okay, once we get past all of the rest of the constructive criticism that the app has.

rightfully gotten. Then you get to the enormous variety of opinions about the app itself, and of course, in the chaos of launching like this and ending up like in the top 10 of the App Store, we get a lot of information about usage and responses from people, and we find all kinds of bugs. Bugs were always expected; we're already on that, but also for the design itself. My philosophy actually was to just try to make as close to the same exact experience as possible between iOS and Android - same UI, same feature set, same everything. And some people like that; some people don't. Obviously, a lot of this is a matter of taste, but some people like, especially want an Android app to feel like, to use the slide-out menus and to feel like a native Android app versus iOS. So, that's something I'm thinking a lot about. And there are also pieces of it like image preview and onboarding that we want to improve a lot. One of the weirdest things I saw was this rumor that we

bought an old existing app and then repackaged it and slapped my face on it. This is very false. I actually found where this came from. Basically, people saw that the panel's Twitter account appears to be from 2021. That's literally because we repurposed an old and inactive Twitter account. I hope you know that that sounds as ridiculous to me as it does to you. But the other thing that came up was that the app being filled with AI generator art. That's also not true, but I should explain how we got to this. So, there are a few pieces that were edited using AI, like some of these skyscraper pieces by Chris Hea, are a really good example where he's taken his own images, these photos of historic buildings, used AI trained on them to generate new ones, and then refined them with Photoshop, and they look so sick. So anyway, I did respond to a tweet like this, but obviously, that's my fault again for not explaining everything super clearly. So we've made sure to label

anything that has any AI involved at any step in the process as AI enhanced, so that's very visible. And if you're curious about how they're using AI, again, a lot of the social media pages linked to the artist, they actually explain how they're using some of this stuff, which is super cool. So, to answer the question of how do we know that this app won't someday just be filled with AI-generated slop, that's the curated part. So, every piece of art that goes into the app is actually gone through us, and so I can personally promise that will never happen. But then, aside from that, I'm obviously pretty biased, but I think the app itself is a pretty solid start. There's reviews out there already, like there's a review from Zone of Tech where he compares it to his own wallpaper app and notes some cool features like visual search that our app has that his doesn't. Even though there's a lot of work we still have to do on that, it's cool to see, and his is also awesome, by the way.

It has some interesting UI ideas and nice haptic touches. Uh, this channel, Juxtaposed, did a great review. It's actually like a constructive facelift for a lot of UI elements, and I just want to say thank you for that video. Like, there's a lot of really helpful stuff in there. This is literally one of my favorite videos of the week, and I subscribed after I watched it. I also want to improve the code to be much more native to each OS. Um, this should help with just memory efficiency in general, but that's something I can put on our developers. But this is the stuff that takes longer. This takes more time, so this is something like we know most of the hard, hard work is ahead of us, and this app should be improving over time, clearly. So then, number four, the future, which brings us to that thing I keep saying, which is never buy a product based on the promise of future software updates. Buy it for what it is today, and I'm never going to stop preaching that. That is still extremely true, but the

Irony is not lost on me that I've also made a lot of references and promises about the future of this app in this video. So I'll still say, if you want to grab a wallpaper or download this app and check it out, get it for what it is today, which is a wallpaper app. Like, if you see a link in the description of any video with a cool piece that you like, you can just jump over there, and that's what panels is today. I actually didn't want to make this video until we'd actually fixed and shipped and gotten approved all the updates to the app that I talked about in this video, so you can see now exactly what it is today. But I also want to shed light on our plans for the future. It's not something you always get to see, and hey, if those plans do materialize, then maybe you'll down the road pick up that app for what it becomes. We are committing to doing weekly drops every Friday of new art into the app, so we have a ton of stuff in queue that we're

going to be going through. That's super sick. And also, if you are an artist and want to be in panels, I'll have a link to a Google form below this video where you can fill it out, and then we can be in touch. I don't have a timeline for when we're going to get through everyone, but we do have a lot of good stuff incoming, and we'll also regularly be updating the app in the App Store and the Play Store. I'm not going to like detail every time there's a new update to it here, but if you want to follow that stuff, you can follow the panels account on Twitter, and that'll be when there's new art in the app with the weekly drops and when there's big new features and stuff like that. So yeah, we may forever be cursed by a one-star rating, and I know that the comments and memes will probably never actually end, even though some of them were pretty funny, but at least hopefully we can, with enough transparency, earn your respect and your

trust back and ideally, the people who want the wallpapers now have somewhere to get them. Truly, thanks for listening, thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.

Let's Talk About Panels

Marques Brownlee

The Panels wallpaper app was launched with a $50 price tier, causing disappointment due to a lack of explanation.

The app was created to provide a consistent source for wallpapers, leveraging the artist's work and offering them more visibility.

The app features a few hundred pieces from handpicked artists, with the option to view more from each artist and connect with their socials.

App's Approach to Wallpaper Art: Free vs.

The app aims to provide both free and paid art, but the pricing strategy has faced criticism.

The developer acknowledges the misjudgment and is committed to improving the free experience by eliminating in-feed ads and offering non-collection wallpapers for free in 1080P.

A single 30-second ad will now provide full-resolution versions, and a new subscription tier is being introduced for power users.

Affordable App Subscription and Artist Support

The app offers an ad-free experience and full-resolution downloads for $2 a month.

It also provides paid art collections, with a $12 subscription option to unlock all collections and premium content.

Additionally, the app offers a yearly subscription for $50, catering to power users, and splits profits with artists 50/50 to support their work.

Artist Agreements and App Privacy Concerns

The artist agreements made have no exclusivity, allowing artists to host the same art on their own websites.

The app's tracking permissions were overly broad, causing confusion, but it does not actually ask for sensitive data like location.

The app can be used without logging in, and efforts are being made to improve its design and user experience based on feedback.

The app's Twitter account appears inactive since 2021 because it was repurposed, not because of any wrongdoing.

While some art pieces in the app were edited using AI, they are clearly labeled as AI enhanced, and the artist's social media pages explain their process.

The app's art is curated personally, and it aims to improve over time, with a focus on native code for better memory efficiency and a commitment to delivering value based on its current features.

The app is currently a wallpaper provider, with a promise of weekly art drops every Friday.

Artists interested in being featured can fill out a Google form for consideration.

Updates will be regularly made in the App Store and Play Store, with new art and features announced on the app's Twitter account.