What’s more important to making a phone really feel yours than a good wallpaper? When iOS 16 broke cover, lock screen wallpaper customization was a big part of the new user experience. Although Android could rival it with third-party solutions, a comparable system-level feature has so far been unavailable. At Google I/O today, the company announced some upcoming features that will change that, with support arriving for uniquely customizable emoji wallpapers and lock screens, as well as cinematic parallax effects applied on your own photos, and completely AI-generated wallpapers.
As Google rightly pointed out during the keynote address, a wallpaper is one of the first things we change on a new device. On stock Android, that’s usually through the Wallpaper & style app, in which Google is cramming three new options for home and lock screen personalization.
If you have a set of favorite emoji, you should soon be able to use them for your wallpaper. You’ll start by picking a few emoji and then setting the pattern in which you want them arranged. You can zoom in and out to adjust their size, as well as select the color scheme to use — and then you’re good to go.
We heard this was coming, but seeing it demonstrated on stage at Google I/O helps our confidence that emoji wallpapers are almost ready for prime time.Better still, the emoji are also touch-responsive, bouncing around when you tap the empty space on your home screen.
Emoji wallpapers (left); Cinematic wallpapers (right)
If you’d rather use personal photos as wallpapers, Android will soon let you add a bit more pop to your shots. With Cinematic wallpapers, Google identifies the foreground elements of your image, uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) to fill in missing parts of the background, and creates a parallax effect similar to the Pixel 7’s Live Bloom wallpapers. You can see the background move around when you tilt your device, and there’s a cool unlock animation exclusive to Cinematic wallpapers. If emoji and your own photos just aren’t cutting it for you, Google is also prepping Generative AI wallpapers. Here, you’ll fill in the blanks to complete a bit of a Mad Libs-style prompt describing your scene and choosing the art style you want used. Google’s text-to-image diffusion model then takes over, creating a few different artsy wallpapers for you to choose from.
Google says that emoji wallpapers and Cinematic wallpapers will roll out to Pixel phones next month, possibly as a part of the June Feature Drop for Android 13. Meanwhile, the AI-generated wallpapers will only become accessible later this fall, perhaps accompanying the wider rollout of Android 14.
Since this will be coming to Android 13 and 14, dynamic theming support will be present, with your icons and system UI colors changing dynamically based on the wallpaper’s color palette. We cannot wait to try this out, and check out all the custom designs users come up with — the possibilities are truly endless.
