Having a good wallpaper on your Android smartphone is an essential part of personalizing your device. 🎨
Whenever you feel that the default wallpaper collection on your phone too limited, you're likely to end up with an ad-infested wallpaper app you downloaded from the Play Store that's too intrusive, forcing you to watch ads before you can download anything.
What if I told you there's an open source wallpaper app that doesn’t do any of that — and instead offers beautifully recreated Pixel wallpapers?
Doodle: A Collection of Pixel Wallpapers
Doodle's About, Main, and Appearance pages.
Developed by Patrick Zedler, a developer out of Germany, Doodle is a Java-based wallpaper app. It features the original Doodle wallpaper collection from the Pixel 4 and the unreleased Material You static wallpaper collection of the Pixel 6.
The "Appearance" page is where you will find all the wallpapers, with three distinct categories that have additional controls to select a wallpaper's variant, add an accent color to the smartphone's interface, set a daily random wallpaper, and toggle night mode.
If you go for one of the three live wallpapers, you have the option to enable the "Swipe" and "Tilt" effects, which makes the live wallpaper react according to the actions performed. If you swipe on the home screen, the live wallpaper will move; if you tilt your device, the live wallpaper will react accordingly.
As you saw above, it's very simple to set live and static wallpapers using Doodle.
If you prefer additional control, you can go into the "Parallax", "Shape size" and "Other options" menus to tweak the animation of live wallpapers, change the app color theme, set a higher level of contrast, and toggle hardware acceleration.
Doodle's Parallax, Shape size, and Other options pages.
I did face some issues with my test setup: an Android 14-equipped Samsung smartphone that was running One UI 6.1. I was unable to use the Swipe effect and Accent Colors. Doodle does mention that there are issues with how the default launcher, One UI Home, handles certain UI elements, so this was not a surprise for me.
When locking/unlocking my device, the live wallpaper sometimes bugged out, and the system's transition from light mode to dark mode required a relaunch of the app for the wallpaper to switch between its light/dark variant.
In the end, I think Doodle could really benefit from offering more non-Pixel wallpaper options. The current collection looks great, but having a few original or differently styled wallpapers would make the app even better.
Install Doodle
The source code is hosted over at GitHub under GPLv3 licensing, with F-Droid and the Play Store being the most straightforward way of getting the latest Doodle release.
💬 Know of a wallpaper app that is open source and offers more choices? Let me know below!
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