I have an Android smartphone for over 2 years now, and until yesterday I never changed the wallpaper. Right when I got the phone I set the wallpaper to a default photo and that’s it. I didn’t even know there’s an option to set a live wallpaper. It’s just a matter of habit I inherited from my old, non-smartphone phone, obviously a Nokia.
If it weren’t for “Wallo Live Wallpaper” I would’ve probably kept going for another 2 years with the same wallpaper. Luckily I installed Wallo to do a test and I must say it’s a new world of inspiration out there. Wallo is an app that once installed on your Android phone and set as a live wallpaper, it will automatically get photos from certain categories from Pinterest and set them as your wallpaper. The photos will be changed with a certain frequency, but if you don’t like the currently wallpaper just double tap on the photo and it will move on to the next and so on. You can tell it what categories to get the photos from, and whenever you see a photo that you adore you can share it via your Pinterest account by just pinching the wallpaper. Just see this short presentation to figure out what this is about:
So how do you use Wallo Live wallpaper and what it can do:
- To use it, go into your smartphone’s “Select Wallpapers” menu, click on “Select Live Wallpapers” and after that click on “Wallo”.
- Once you click on Wallo, it will start with a short tutorial introduction where you can see how to change the photo (double-tap) and how to share it via Pinterest. Close the tutorial to be able to modify its Settings. The most important part is the Categories section, where you can go in and select what categories you want to display photos from: Travel, Women’s Fashion, Food & Drink, Weddings, Architecture and inspirational Quotes. By default they’re all checked, but for me Weddings and Women’s Fashion had to be unchecked :).
- After the new categories are selected, Wallo will start downloading some photos from Pinterest and voila, your smartphone’s wallpaper will keep refreshing with new photos. If you don’t like one of the photos, double-tap to change, if you like one too much pinch and share it.
- You don’t need to link your Pinterest account to Wallo’s settings to have the photos shown. However, if you want to repin the photos displayed through your Pinterest account, then you’ll need to link it.
Now, given the nature of this app there are certain common sense things you should be aware of:
- First, this app needs data transfer enabled, as it has to go in and download the photos from Pinterest on your phone in a temporary location. So if your phone doesn’t have a data transfer plan, then it won’t work as it won’t be able to download the photos without a connection.
- The photos are filtered by Pinterest, not by Wallo, but in my experience Pinterest’s filter is excellent so nothing to worry about seeing an inappropriate photo.
- Some photos might be copyrighted, so once you see it on your phone it doesn’t mean that you own the photo, it just means that it was temporarily displayed on your phone. If you want to use one of the photos for other purposes, you’ll have to go into Pinterest and see details about it, what’s allowed and what not.
Wallo Live Wallpaper will beautify your smartphone, from an inspirational photo to a recreational travel destination, and all for free (no payment required at all). You can go ahead and visit the developer’s website at http://www.wallowallpaper.com/ for details or go directly to Google Play to install it: Wallo Live Wallpaper.
The development team behind Wallo accepted to answer a few questions for our readers, below you can read what they shared with us regarding the app and future plans.
Q: Can you share some information about yourself with our readers?
A: We are a small developer team based in South East Asia (Indonesia & Singapore), goes by the name Ciyus. I am the main developer of the team.
Q: How did you come with the idea to create your app, what inspired you?
A: What gave us the idea is how troublesome it is to keep changing our wallpaper (several steps needed) when we just want to look at something new and interesting. And Pinterest images have been relatively fun to see, so why not combine the two? :)
Q: How long did it take from that idea until the first public release?
A: Roughly around 3-4 months.
Q: Have you developed other apps or is this your first one? Do they target only the Android market or others as well (i.e. iOS)?
A: This is the first one and we are only targeting Android (for now) because other platforms still don’t support live wallpaper feature.
Q: With hundred of thousand of apps in the appstore, how do you make people aware of your apps?
A: We are trying out different avenues such as advertising, social media engagement, blog reviews and also through friends and families.
Q: What future plans you have for your app (new features, …)?
A: We will introduce more image categories and other social media sharing options such as Facebook. Other more engaging features are also coming up soon! So stay tuned :)
Q: What popular apps are an inspiration for you as a developer and why?
A: Angry birds is definitely one of them. Apart from its fantastic gameplay and graphics, Angry birds managed to increase its popularity through various other means such as merchandise and also sponsorship deals. We learned that to be a successful developer in this increasingly congested app market, we need more than just awesome programming skills. It is a mesh between technical and business aspects after all.
Q: Have any tips/advices for other developers that want to start working on an app? Any tools that you consider to be a must?
A: Starts by familiarizing yourself with the basic tools, such eclipse, logcat :) and dont be afraid to try out sample codes.
