Wallpapers

Review by eFreeware

The most distinctive thing about Wallpapers is where its images come from. Alongside your own photos, it draws on collections from Google Earth and Google+, so the backgrounds on offer are landscapes, satellite views and photography rather than the clip-art-style packs that fill a lot of wallpaper apps. Google LLC publishes it as a free personalization tool, and it has been installed over a billion times.

That reach tells you something about the audience. This is not a niche app for people who treat customization as a hobby; it is a general-purpose tool for anyone who wants their phone to look less like it did on day one. If you change your background a few times a year and want decent material to choose from, it fits. If you enjoy building elaborate themed setups, it is one input among several rather than a complete toolkit.

What you actually do with it

The core loop is simple: browse a catalog, pick an image, apply it. The catalog mixes your own photographs with the Google Earth and Google+ collections, and the developer describes it as one that keeps growing as new partner material is added. That matters more than it sounds. A wallpaper app lives or dies on whether the selection stays interesting after the first week, and a rotating set of sources is a reasonable answer to that.

The app also handles the mechanics of applying an image, which is where a lot of manual wallpaper setting falls down. You are not saving a file to a folder and then hunting through system settings for it; the selection and the application happen in the same place.

Custom photos are supported, which keeps the app useful even if the built-in collections do not match your taste. You point it at an image you already have and use that instead. The result is a tool that works both as a browsing experience and as a straightforward way to put a picture you like onto your screen.

Two screens, two images

One feature stands out for anyone who cares about how their phone looks: the app can place one image on the lock screen and a different one on the home screen. The developer notes that this requires Android 7.0 Nougat or above, which is a fair bar given how long ago that release landed, but it is a real requirement rather than a footnote.

In practice this split is more useful than it first appears. The lock screen is the image you see dozens of times a day in passing, usually partly obscured by notifications and a clock; the home screen is the one you look at while actually using the phone, surrounded by icons. Wanting a calmer image behind your apps and something more striking on the lock screen is a reasonable preference, and the app supports it directly instead of forcing one choice on both.

If you are on an older device, the two-screen option is the part you would lose.

A fresh image each morning

The daily rotation is the feature I would expect to be most divisive. Choose a category, and a fresh image from it arrives every day.

The trade-off is the obvious one. A daily change means you give up control over exactly what appears, and you are trusting the category you chose to keep producing images you are happy to look at. Someone who has found one photograph they love and wants it to stay put is better served by setting it once and leaving the rotation off. Someone who treats the background as a small daily novelty will get more out of it.

That is a reasonable design, but it does mean the feature is only as good as the collection behind it.

What it asks for and what it costs

The app is free, carries no advertising, and offers no in-app purchases. Here there is nothing to buy and nothing to sit through.

It does ask for permissions, and the developer explains why. Photos, media and files access is needed so you can use your own pictures as wallpaper, and storage access is needed both to display the wallpaper currently in use and to let you apply custom photos. These are the permissions the stated features require rather than anything more exotic, which is about as clean as this kind of request gets.

The other practical consideration is the Android version requirement for the dual-screen feature. On Android 7.0 Nougat and above you get separate lock and home screen images; below that, you do not.

The most recent update, from September 2020, is described as interface improvements and bug fixes. There is nothing new to learn if you have used the app before, and nothing dramatic to look forward to if you have not.

Where this fits in your setup

This is a good match for someone who wants their phone to feel less generic without spending time on it. The combination of a curated catalog, your own photos, and an optional daily change covers the common cases: a background you picked deliberately, a background you supplied yourself, and a background that updates without your involvement.

It also suits people who like the idea of Google Earth imagery on their screen but have no interest in downloading and cropping satellite images themselves. Having that material available inside the same app that applies it removes the fiddly middle step.

The app is a narrower proposition than a full theming tool. It deals with wallpapers and the two screens they go on, and that is the extent of it. Judged on that focus, the feature set is coherent: sources, application, the lock and home screen split, and rotation. Anyone expecting icon packs, widget styling or a broader customization suite is looking at the wrong category of app.

The 4.1 average across roughly 295,000 ratings suggests a broadly satisfied audience rather than a universally adored one, which is about what you would expect from a free utility that ships on a huge range of devices.

A straightforward pick for a better-looking screen

I would recommend Wallpapers to anyone who wants a decent background on their phone with minimal effort. It is free, it does not interrupt you with ads, and it gives you three routes to an image: the built-in collections, your own photos, or a daily rotation from a category you choose. The ability to run different images on the lock and home screens is the feature that lifts it above a simple gallery of pictures, provided your device runs Android 7.0 or later.

It is best suited to the casual customizer rather than the dedicated themer. If you change your background occasionally and want good material to choose from, this covers it well. If your goal is a fully styled home screen, wallpapers are only one piece of that, and this app addresses just that piece.

For a free tool with this much reach, that is a sensible combination.

What's new

UI improvements and bugfixes.