Wallpapers on Android serve a bigger purpose than acting as a background image and making your home screen look beautiful. Wallpapers reflect your individual style and add a personal touch to your device. Thanks to the numerous apps, your Android device has many options that give you the option to choose how the wallpaper on your device behaves.
You can control the wallpaper scroll, rotate wallpapers periodically as well as change wallpaper settings for landscape and portrait mode. Got plenty of videos and photos on your device? Put them to good use and set the photos and even the videos as wallpapers on your Android device.
Android users have several options when it comes to wallpaper selection and they are ever-increasing due to the numerous apps available in the Android Market. We have listed down the Best Wallpaper apps for Android below. These apps should satiate the wallpaper appetite of even the most demanding wallpaper seeker. But before we get to that, let first us go through the basics.
How to Apply or Change the Static Android Wallpaper?
This section is aimed at the beginners. If personalization on Android is not new to you, please skip to the next section.
There are various ways of changing the wallpaper on your device. This depends on the ROM, Launcher and applications that you may have installed on your phone. The process stated here is by the Gallery method. This method should work on almost all Android Devices.
- At your Home screen, press ‘Menu’. (Long Press on the Home screen will give you the personalize menu as above.)
- Select ‘Wallpaper’ from the menu. This will give you a list of options using which you can choose your wallpapers. (I am getting quite a long list as I tried many apps while writing this article)
- Choose ‘Gallery’ option. (This option should be available on all devices)
- Browse to the folder which holds the image that you want to apply as wallpaper and select it.
- Now you get an option to crop the image as you wish. If you want to reduce the image size or only use a specific part of the image, crop it accordingly.
- When done, tap on ‘Save’ and the wallpaper should be applied.
Note: Some users complain that, despite careful cropping of the wallpapers, the wallpapers they apply often appear ‘blurry’. This is due to the way Android handles wallpapers, which is in a way, unique. If you are one of these users, read this to understand Android’s ‘weird’ wallpaper requirements.
Best Wallpaper Apps for Android:
The wallpaper apps in the Android market are numerous, to say the least. Not all of them are good, some are just a rip-off of popular apps and not worth a second look. We combed the Android Market and looked at the various options available in and came up with the best wallpaper apps for your Android device.
These apps aren’t listed in a specific order.
1. PicSpeed HD Wallpapers
Start using PicSpeed; and the first thing that you notice is that it is a very well organized app. Wallpapers are divided into categories, all of which have sub-categories of their own. The image below shows the categories and the sub-categories under the Abstract section.
Explore further and you get a grid-based display of all the available wallpapers.
The wallpaper you choose can be resized before applying. The app also has the option to change the folder where the wallpapers are saved and also change the wallpapers periodically. The wallpapers are changed automatically from your favorites folder based on the time period you set.
Update: The Picspeed HD Wallpapers app is discontinued, below is the link of its alternative.
2. Backgrounds HD Wallpapers
The strength of Backgrounds App is the huge number of good quality wallpapers that you can browse through the app.
There are a number of categories to choose from – each with a huge choice of wallpapers. Again, there is an option to enable a ‘Slideshow’ that will set one of your favorites as your wallpaper on a periodic basis.
3. Colors
If you have a taste for minimalist wallpapers, it can’t get more minimal than this. Colors is an app that has on offer a plain wallpaper, in colors of your choice.
The app has hundreds of colors but if you still can’t find your favorite color; simply pick a color of your own liking and set it as wallpaper. I don’t usually like plain backgrounds, but on seeing the options available in this app, I think plain wallpapers are good for a change.
There are a couple of nice alternatives to Colors – Simple Wallpaper and I Love Color. Plain wallpapers, gradients, stripes and color bars and palettes, name it and you’ve got it.
4. Featured Wallpapers
A pretty big collection of good quality wallpapers in various categories. You can also save the wallpapers to SD card.
One feature I found different in this app is that it gives you a scrollable view of the wallpaper whenever you open one. This will give you an exact idea as to how the image will look as your wallpaper and you can check the wallpaper scrolling right there!
5. Pattern Wallpapers
This app targets a niche area of wallpapers – Patterns. Choose from a huge variety of patterns for your wallpaper. Automatic pattern change option is also available.
Patterns are not my thing, but for those who like them, Pattern Wallpapers app is a gift. The collection is huge, but the app should have a more friendly interface. It is not really easy to browse through so many patterns.
If you like patterns, you may also like to check out Texture Wallpaper. It offers a relatively small yet impressive collection of high-quality textures.
6. Flikie Wallpapers HD
Flikie Wallpapers is hands down, the best-looking wallpapers app in the Android Market. The app sports a beautiful interface that is not only fluid but also easy to navigate.
Numerous options are available in the app. The categories can be sorted alphabetically or by popularity. The wallpapers can be viewed in a grid or album view.
The collection is decent sized with high-quality wallpapers. Overall, Flikie Wallpapers is an awesome application. Best Wallpapers HD is another good wallpaper app from the same developer.
Update: This app is currently discontinued. The altenative link for this app is below.
7. Color – Colorful Backgrounds
If you like a colorful wallpaper, Color backgrounds is the app for you. Numerous patterns and palettes are available in the app for your use.
A nice feature is that you can create your own palettes and patterns. Besides that, you can apply various effects to existing patterns – giving you an almost unlimited variety of wallpapers.
8. Wallpapers HD
After seeing so many wallpaper apps, I was wondering what unique feature can this app offer? Well, it has one.
Various colors are listed down in the app and choose one of your choice. I chose ‘Black & White’ and the wallpapers gallery shows only Black and White wallpapers. It is color based sorting! Pick your favorite color and get going.
Well, these are the best apps that we found. If you think we missed any cool wallpaper app, let us know in the comments. Lets now look at a few tips that will help you personalize your Android device further.
Automatically Changing Wallpapers using Images on SD Card
Though quite a few applications mentioned above come with a handy wallpaper rotator, the apps are mostly limited to rotating wallpapers from their favorites folder. Now, you may have different favorite wallpapers in different applications, so the best way is to save all your favorite wallpapers to SD card.
Wallpaper Changer can be used to automatically change the wallpapers using images on your SD card. The imaged are changed periodically or based in certain events that can be setup from the app settings.
Cropping and Resizing Wallpapers
Though the wallpaper apps give you an option of cropping the image before using it as a wallpaper, there is a distinct reduction in the quality of wallpaper when applied through the app. This is because the Android OS decreases the wallpaper quality when you set it from the built in wallpaper changer. This can be avoided using applications like Crop Wallpaper, which keep the wallpaper quality intact.
Its not always that the images you have are of the right size to be used as a wallpaper. AutoResizeWallpaper can be used to resize images that are not of the required dimensions.
Using Videos and Photos as wallpapers
Video Live Wallpaper is an awesome free app to set videos as wallpapers. Note that not all video formats work well as wallpapers. Got a large collection of photographs? Put them to good use as wallpaper with PhotoWall Live Wallpaper and apply cool effects to bring your photos to life!
Using photos and videos as wallpaper on Android is more like using a Live Wallpaper rather than a static one. We will cover these features in more detail when we take a look at the Live Wallpapers for Android.
That’s all, folks. Is there anything else about Android wallpapers that you want to know? If you think we missed any point, let us know. We will add it to the article!
