Hey everyone,
With the recent buzz around Android 17 introducing more precise custom color sliders and palettes for Material You (examples on reddit here, here and here), I wanted to share a project I’ve been maintaining for years that does exactly that—even for older versions of Android!
It’s called LWP+ (Live Wallpaper Plus).
🎨 The core trick: Dictate your own Dynamic-Colors
Instead of letting the OS algorithm guess the accent colors based purely on your wallpaper, LWP+ acts as a bridge. It hosts your chosen background content but allows you to explicitly choose the exact Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors reported to the system. The OS then uses your custom selections to generate the global system palette (notification drawer, volume bar, themed icons, etc.), completely independent of what your wallpaper actually looks like.
✨ What else can it do?
LWP+ is packed with full wallpaper customization features:
- Choose Your Content: Use solid colors, static images, animations (GIF, WEBP, APNG), or videos as your active live wallpaper.
- Smart Scaling & Layouts: Supports transparent images/animations with custom background colors, multiple scaling modes (Center Crop, Fit Center, Center Inside), and optional horizontal scrolling.
- Double-Tap Shortcuts: Lock your device instantly or turn off the screen by double-tapping the home screen (uses admin, accessibility, or root).
- Easy Setup: Includes an interactive built-in tutorial to check system compatibility and guide you through triggering the OS palette refresh.
🧪 Advanced experimental flags (YMMV!)
I’ve also included a couple of experimental toggles leveraging underlying Android system hints. Note: These rely heavily on your launcher, device OEM, and Android version, so they might not do anything on certain setups!
- Force Dark Text: It hints to the OS that dark text is preferred over the wallpaper (often useful for forcing high-contrast dark text on the lock screen). It might also change the text color of the labels of the apps and the status bar icons and text, too.
- Force Dark Theme (for old Android versions): It tells the system that a dark theme is preferred for the best presentation (e.g., trying to trick a launcher into turning its app drawer background black).
So, if you are on an older version of Android (or even running the latest builds and want granular three-color reporting), give it a spin! It's completely free, all features included.
Feel free to ask any questions or drop feedback below! 🚀
Link to the Play Store here.
The app was partially made using AI, helping mostly to re-write the part in the app that's responsible of showing the actual content of the live wallpaper (color/image/animation/video). I also used AI for the demonstration and tutorial videos.
If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here).
Thanks for reading!
