Vanderwaals is a free, open-source AI wallpaper app for Android that uses on-device machine learning to understand your visual preferences and automatically delivers wallpapers you’ll love.
The app runs a MobileNetV3 neural network completely offline to extract 576-dimensional visual embeddings from images and adapts based on your feedback.
You can use Vanderwaals in two ways: start fresh and let the AI gradually learn your aesthetic through likes and dislikes. Or upload one favorite wallpaper to instantly get 100+ similar matches. Both modes continuously adapt to your preferences over time.
Features
- On-Device AI Learning: MobileNetV3 neural network analyzes the artistic style, composition, mood, and subject matter of wallpapers without internet access.
- Smart Personalization Algorithm: Exponential Moving Average (EMA) smoothly integrates new preferences without forgetting old ones.
- 8,000+ Curated Wallpapers: Collections from GitHub repositories plus Bing’s photography archive. Weekly auto-sync keeps content fresh.
- Advanced Similarity Matching: Combines deep visual features (70%), LAB color space analysis (20%), and category affinity (10%) to find wallpapers that match your taste.
- Auto-Change Options: Set wallpapers to change on device unlock, fixed intervals (1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, 24h), daily at a custom time, or manually.
- Complete Privacy: Zero tracking, zero analytics, no cloud ML APIs, no data collection. All processing happens on your device.
- Material 3 Design: Modern glassmorphic UI with dynamic color theming that extracts colors from your current wallpaper (Android 12+). AMOLED-optimized dark theme and smooth Lottie animations.
- History & Analytics: View all applied wallpapers in a chronological timeline with timestamps.
- Smart Crop Technology: Intelligent image cropping uses saliency detection to focus on interesting regions. The preview matches what gets applied to your screen.
- Samsung Optimization: Dedicated “Keep-Alive” service with SamsungPowerHelper bypasses aggressive One UI battery restrictions on S23+ devices.
How To Use It
1. Download and install the Vanderwaals app from the Google Play Store or GitHub releases page. The app requires Android 12.0 (API 31) or higher and about 50MB of storage space.
2. Open the app and select either Auto Mode or Personalize Mode. Auto Mode starts you with algorithm-selected wallpapers from curated collections. The AI learns your taste as you provide feedback. Personalize Mode lets you upload one favorite wallpaper to instantly get 100+ visually similar results.
3. Like or dislike wallpapers as they appear. Each reaction helps the AI understand your preferences. The app also learns from implicit feedback (wallpapers that stay on your screen for less than 5 minutes register as dislikes, while those lasting over 24 hours register as likes).
4. Go to settings and select your preferred auto-change mode. You can set wallpapers to change on device unlock, at fixed intervals, or daily at a specific time. Choose whether to apply changes to your lock screen, home screen, or both.
5. Check the history screen to see all applied wallpapers with timestamps. You can like, dislike, or download any wallpaper directly from this screen. The full-screen preview supports pinch-to-zoom for detailed inspection.
6. The app uses the Exponential Moving Average to balance new preferences with existing ones. New users get a faster learning rate (30%) while experienced users have a more stable rate (15%). The algorithm automatically adjusts as you use the app more.
7. Vanderwaals automatically syncs new wallpapers from GitHub and Bing weekly. You can manually trigger a sync in settings if you want fresh content immediately.
Pros
- Zero Data Leaks: The app operates 100% offline after the initial content sync.
- No Ads: Clean and free of commercial interruptions.
- Open Source: You can audit the code yourself to verify the privacy claims.
- High-Quality Sources: The app pulls from curated repositories like Bing Photography and aesthetic GitHub collections rather than low-quality scrapers.
Cons
- OS Requirement: You must have Android 12 (API 31) or higher to run the app.
- Storage Usage: The app caches images and embeddings locally. This takes up about 50MB initially and grows as you browse.
Related Resources
- Vanderwaals GitHub Repository: Access the full source code, contribute improvements, or report bugs.
- Paperize Project: Check out the original wallpaper app that inspired Vanderwaals’ infrastructure.
- MobileNetV3 Research Paper: Read about the neural network architecture used for image embedding extraction.
FAQs
Q: What happens to my learned preferences if I uninstall and reinstall the app?
A: Your preference profile gets deleted when you uninstall Vanderwaals. Reinstalling starts you fresh with no memory of your previous likes and dislikes.
Q: Does the AI get better the more I use the app?
A: Yes, the Exponential Moving Average algorithm continuously refines your preference profile with each like, dislike, and implicit feedback signal. The learning rate starts at 30% for new users (faster adaptation) and stabilizes at 15% once you’ve provided enough feedback. Implicit learning tracks how long wallpapers stay on your screen (under 5 minutes registers as dislike, over 24 hours registers as like).
Q: Does Vanderwaals drain the battery?
A: The app uses efficient scheduling via Android’s WorkManager. The app also includes specific optimizations for Samsung devices to balance performance and battery life.
Q: How does the app know what I like?
A: Vanderwaals converts every image into a series of numbers (embeddings) that represent style, color, and composition. When you like an image, the app adjusts your “preference vector” closer to those numbers. It uses cosine similarity to find other images that have similar mathematical values.
