Performance

The honest answer is 'it depends what kind' — so here's what actually costs battery in a live wallpaper, and what doesn't, from someone who has spent a lot of time measuring it.

'GPU-accelerated' gets thrown around a lot. Here's what it actually means for a live wallpaper — and why a WebGL scene and a looping video behave so differently even when they look similar.

Perlin Flow Fields moves thousands of particles at once, which sounds expensive. Here's how it stays cheap — the trick is where the work happens, not how little of it there is.

A video loop is the obvious way to build a live wallpaper app. Here's why we didn't, and what OffscreenCanvas actually buys you instead.

Motion isn't automatically better. Here's when a live wallpaper is worth the battery and CPU it costs, and when a static image is just the smarter choice.