Rorschach: Live Wallpapers

Polyhistor

About this app

A new inkblot, every time you look.

Rorschach is a live wallpaper that draws its own art. Every inkblot is generated on your phone, from nothing: a symmetrical plate that spreads from the fold, breathes quietly, then dissolves and reforms as one you have never seen. There is no gallery to download and no two blots alike.

BUILT FOR AMOLED AND DARK MODE

Pick Night paper and the background goes to near-black, so an AMOLED or OLED panel simply leaves those pixels switched off. You get a true black wallpaper that costs almost nothing in battery and reads like ink on a page instead of a photograph. If you would rather have paper, Cream is warm and Cool is a grey white.

SEVEN DIALS, NOTHING ELSE

• New blot every — slow, normal or fast
• Spread — a small plate, a filled page, or ink running over the edge
• Bleed — crisp edges, soft, or a wet spread
• Colour — pure black ink, a mixed plate, or a colour wash, with accents in vermilion, rust, mulberry and moss
• Paper — cream, cool grey, or night black
• Motion — perfectly still, gentle breathing, or lively
• Recall — every new blot, your kept ones more often, or only your kept ones

Each one is a single tap. No menus inside menus, no sliders to fiddle with, no sign-in before you can change a colour.

KEEP THE ONES YOU LIKE

The last three plates stay in the settings screen. Tap one to keep it. Kept blots can then turn up more often than new ones, or take over completely, so the ink blot you liked comes back instead of vanishing forever. Tap the live preview any time to draw a fresh one on the spot.

HOME SCREEN AND LOCK SCREEN

Set it on both. Swipe between home screens and the ink shifts with a quiet parallax, so the wallpaper has depth without shouting about it. This is a moving wallpaper that stays in the background where a background belongs.

NOTHING ELSE IN IT

• No ads, anywhere, ever
• No internet permission — it cannot phone home, because it has no way to
• No permissions at all, not one
• No account, no tracking, no analytics, no data collected
• Works completely offline
• A small download, because there is no image library to ship

DRAWN, NOT DOWNLOADED

Most wallpaper apps hand you a folder of photographs. This one is a generative art wallpaper: an algorithm folds ink on paper and lets it bleed, the way the original inkblots were made a century ago. Hermann Rorschach printed ten plates. Your phone will never run out.

The shapes are symmetric, abstract and a little unsettling. Look at one long enough and you will start naming it — a moth, a pelvis, two dancers, a skull. That is the whole point of an ink blot, and it is why these make better wallpaper than another photograph of a mountain: your eye keeps finding something new in a background that is only ink and paper.

QUIET BY DESIGN

The blot holds still most of the time and only breathes if you ask it to. Nothing flashes, nothing scrolls, nothing asks to be tapped. It is a calm, minimalist, aesthetic wallpaper for people who find most live wallpapers exhausting.

Works on phones and tablets running Android 7.0 or newer.

One purchase. No subscription, no in-app payments, no upsell screen.