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DashSatan

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 29, 2011
419
17
Will iOS ever support live wallpapers? Like real ones. From what I hear whatever the app market has are all cheap knock offs.
 
Who knows? There is nothing offocial slated as far as live wallpapers are concerned. My guess is they will do it eventually (maybe iOS 10) and claim that it took this long because they were the first to do it right.
 
I would like to have live wallpapers what people come up with. I have Fahrenheit which updates the badge with the current temperature. It would be great to have more. On a bad day my battery only goes down to around 50% so if a live wallpaper drains the battery I say, "Bring it on!".
 
There used to be some jb apps that let you put on different live wp's. I really liked a few of them. Not sure why they aren't around any more.... well maybe they are but I don't have them uploaded.
 
it gets old believe me. it's the least feature i want for the iPhone.

used it on my galaxy s2 before, major battery drain, swiping becomes not as smooth, especially with some widgets on it.
 
it gets old believe me. it's the least feature i want for the iPhone.

used it on my galaxy s2 before, major battery drain, swiping becomes not as smooth, especially with some widgets on it.
I have Ice Galaxy running on my S2 and see really no difference in battery life vs a 'still' wallpaper. And no lag or loss of smoothness, it's still as smooth as butter when swiping. And with that wallpaper it's cool when you swipe either direction and the flow of it switches to the direction your swiping. I'm running the Sense Analog Glass Clock and Weather, looks slick with that wallpaper.

OP - I still have some live wallpapers, even custom ones that I used on my jb'd iphone. I think I used to run vwallper for them which comes with a couple. But then you could download custom ones/themes and ssh the files to the root of vwallpaper to use. I had a really nice setup with these see through icons (not glass) and a very cool wallpaper actually similar to the Ice Galaxy running on my S2. I did notice some battery drain over normal running that but nothing detrimental, but I also had a lot of custom tweaks done to that phone as well
 
Correctly done live wallpapers (I've written one) have minimal effect on the battery.

The main reason is because they usually only run when you're actually looking at a homescreen... and that's not that often. Usually you turn on your phone, look, find the info or start an app, and you no longer see the background.

Depends on the wallpaper, too. For example, one that simply changes static backgrounds can use as little as 15 seconds of CPU time a day. At the other end of the spectrum, a highly interactive one could use 15 seconds of CPU every minute of viewing, but again how long are you actually looking at a homescreen?

To cause battery issues, you'd have to sit there keeping the screen alive just to enjoy a background animation, and that's conceptually no different than sitting and watching a video or using a game app.
 
Honest question, is there a point to having a live wallpaper or is it just an "Oooh shiny!" sort of thing?
 
Major battery drain! I tried quite a few on Android and they all do it.

Live wallpapers account for a very minimal amount of battery drain. If you ever used an app that shows what is using the battery you'd notice that typically live wallpapers account for less than 1% of battery use. Even more complex live wallpapers still only have a small amount of battery usage.

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Honest question, is there a point to having a live wallpaper or is it just an "Oooh shiny!" sort of thing?

the same point of having a wallpaper...
 
Live wallpapers account for a very minimal amount of battery drain. If you ever used an app that shows what is using the battery you'd notice that typically live wallpapers account for less than 1% of battery use. Even more complex live wallpapers still only have a small amount of battery usage.

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Look at your percentages, remove what you can't prevent from draining power (like display power). Recalculate the percentages. Now does it make a difference? Not saying it is a huge number now, but it's definitely not negligible.
 
Look at your percentages, remove what you can't prevent from draining power (like display power). Recalculate the percentages. Now does it make a difference? Not saying it is a huge number now, but it's definitely not negligible.

I don't think you're getting what I'm saying. Of all the things that consume the battery, the percentage accounted for by the live wallpaper is negligible. I'm not talking about the battery screen in the settings. I'm talking about something like "where's my droid power" that breaks everything down from apps to processes. Yes it is a very small amount of battery, not enough to be concerned about.
 
Fair enough, just making sure I wasn't missing something.
If I could fig' out a way to post a video of my screen on my SGII (is there like a 'capture' program to use for vids kinda like taking a snapshot of the screen?) I would post a clip.

But here's a clip of it I found from youtube that I'm using on my SGII:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPRQp9CDDjc

I'm using the Sense Glass Analog Clock and Weather widget so it look's very cool yet clean on the home screen as it's designed well and you can see the wallpaper (live or still) through it. And yeh like mentioned above, I've seen no real difference in battery life maybe a % here and there, so people thinking it drains are on crack lol, you'd have to have your phone stay on constantly on the screen to see it drain, and who does that? lol.

Same thing for my iPhone except I noticed a bit more drain vs still wallpapers, and that could be b/c iOS doesn't handle it built in like Android does, as you have to use either vwallpaper or winterboard I believe, and if i recall I used vwallpaper b/c it handled them better as winterboard would glitch sometimes and have more battery drain running them.
 
Honest question, is there a point to having a live wallpaper or is it just an "Oooh shiny!" sort of thing?

Most are just for fun... kind of like some of the UI animations common to smartphones these days... but it depends on the wallpaper and what you want.

For instance, I mostly use one that does nothing more than display (fade in) a different static wallpaper for each homepage. This allows me to instantly recognize which page I'm on, without paying too much attention.

Others use live wallpapers that are more like a giant widget seen as a background on every homepage. E.g. a map of your current location. Weather and/or light conditions outside. System status. All useful info to some people.

There's even a live wallpaper that replaces the background with the view from the rear camera! You can be looking directly at your homepage and see what's happening behind it without anyone knowing you can... and yet still see incoming info on the screen widgets.
 
There is little value in a live wallpaper short of one I found for my droid that bundled a clock, battery percentage meter, wifi network status, and weather all into one. They all drained the battery faster, some more than others, and all are pretty much a gimmick.
 
vWallpaper app on Cydia. Does not run in the background either so there is no noticeable battery drain.

Haven't missed video wallpapers in my 4S though, and I turned off live wallpapers on my android tablet because they were distracting and made homescreen switching laggy.

And what is up with all the android smartphone users trolling this iPhone forum? Go enjoy your phones and stop bugging us!
 
vWallpaper app on Cydia. Does not run in the background either so there is no noticeable battery drain.

Haven't missed video wallpapers in my 4S though, and I turned off live wallpapers on my android tablet because they were distracting and made homescreen switching laggy.

And what is up with all the android smartphone users trolling this iPhone forum? Go enjoy your phones and stop bugging us!
yeh vWallpaper is what I used, winterboard live wallpapers would drain and some had glitches with it.. so you could have all your live wallpapers and ssh them to vwallpaper to run. That's what I did.

I'm no troll though, I have two iPhones and this SGII :D
 
Not too much point to a live wallpaper on a tiny 3.5" screen jam packed with icons.
 
OP - I still have some live wallpapers, even custom ones that I used on my jb'd iphone. I think I used to run vwallper for them which comes with a couple. But then you could download custom ones/themes and ssh the files to the root of vwallpaper to use. I had a really nice setup with these see through icons (not glass) and a very cool wallpaper actually similar to the Ice Galaxy running on my S2. I did notice some battery drain over normal running that but nothing detrimental, but I also had a lot of custom tweaks done to that phone as well

I'm using the Sense Glass Analog Clock and Weather widget so it look's very cool yet clean on the home screen as it's designed well and you can see the wallpaper (live or still) through it. And yeh like mentioned above, I've seen no real difference in battery life maybe a % here and there, so people thinking it drains are on crack lol, you'd have to have your phone stay on constantly on the screen to see it drain, and who does that? lol.

Same thing for my iPhone except I noticed a bit more drain vs still wallpapers, and that could be b/c iOS doesn't handle it built in like Android does, as you have to use either vwallpaper or winterboard I believe, and if i recall I used vwallpaper b/c it handled them better as winterboard would glitch sometimes and have more battery drain running them.
Hi, would you mind sharing some of your videos and widgets please? :)

I'm using vwallpaper2 as I think they looks cool, but there are many things I'm still not familiar with and I think many people here are not using them. :(
 
They get boring after a while. And on android they are a major source of lag too.

I took off the live wallpaper from the galaxy tab 10.1 once, the performance jump alone was astonishing. So no thanks.
 
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