Material Islands™ - Semi-live

Jenny Hanell

About this app

Material Islands™ is a Minimal and Material design inspired semi-live wallpaper that does not drain your battery or eat up your RAM.

Material & Minimalistic

Choose among several different, individually unique and beautifully minimalistic islands for your homescreen. Feeling forest-y? 🌲 Go with Isle of Trees! Feeling that anger boiling? Maybe Isle of Lava is more fitting! 🔥 Sitting on the subway? 🚆 Isle of Urbanity is probably a good fit! More islands are constantly being worked on as the artist Jenny Hanell finds the time to do so.

Live wallpaper without the battery drain 🔋

From the very beginning Material Islands was built to have an as small as possible impact on both your RAM and battery. The islands are not doing any superfluous animations that make your device stutter but instead are silently updated in the background so that anytime there's a redraw ready it has already happened! Forget 60 FPS, with Material Islands it is more like a handful frames a day!

Daytime, Nighttime, Anytime 🌄🌃

Your chosen island follows you through the day! While you're getting ready in the morning the Isle of Ice is still warming up from the night. When you are leaving the office for the day it looks like the party at the Isle of Paradise has already started. When you are refreshing the stream of your social network of choice for the last time late at night the Isle of Sand has already long fallen asleep.

Superdupersharp

Every Material Island is rendered straight from raw code, pixel-by-pixel right on your device ensuring a supersharp experience.

Free, with paid upgrades

This core experience of the app is completely free and there are no ads. If you want to you can upgrade your experience by adding live weather to your islands with an in-app purchase. If you really want to support me you can also by me a beer or another beverage in the support tab of the app 🙂

Copyright notice

The artwork in this app is made by the developer and belongs to her. It is not allowed to use the images outside the scope of the app.

Ratings and reviews

The wallpaper is just what I wanted. BUT, when I saw the live weather option available for purchase, I figured why not. But, it keeps telling me that no weather information was found for the current time. I have a pixel 3a running Android 10. I also sent you an email. Please have this fixed and/or issue me a refund. Thank you! EDIT: they briefly fixed the issue and even offered me a refund. However, I refreshed the location and the live weather functionality stopped working.. defaulting to sun.

I was using Google's City Sillhouette live wallpapers before discovering this, and it solves the issue that Google hardcodes the time transitions to the city displayed (PT for SF, ET for NYC). This app is so much better! Three issues though: - some of the wallpaper sets feel a tad bright in the morning; being able to adjust brightness would be great - transitions do not seem to be location aware (eg in winter, the darker colors should last longer) - weather detection seems unreliable

Edit: As of today the weather is showing correctly once again for my area. Parallax doesn't work but I decided to purchase live weather anyway. Unfortunately, it worked only once for about a day. I'm so disappointed. At least the randomization & time of day image changes work. This app has the potential to be great but judging from other comments, the developer doesn't seem too interested in fixing or even acknowledging these issues because they've been ongoing for quite awhile! Such a shame.

What's new

Location info:
Material Islands only asks for the device’s location if the setting “Use live weather” has been enabled, in order to provide weather functionality to the user as an addition to the live wallpaper backgrounds. Only longitude and latitude is being sent to MET Norway via an API, no other device specific data. If location data is disabled, the app will work just fine except for the weather feature.