Remarkably, Android has brought support for live wallpapers with the release of Android 2.0 in 2009. Still, the OS can only support single live wallpaper for both the home and lock screen. Since OS gives support for static wallpaper to do the same but can’t allow for live wallpapers. The most obvious reason, it’s not implemented yet. But, things could be changing from Android 14.
While moving deep down in the source code for Android 13 QPR2, which was released last week. It is been spotted numerous code changes, same depicts an “independent lock screen live wallpaper” feature. One of the new code changes depicts a new method to Android’s WallpaperManager class called setWallpaperComponentWithFlags(). Notably, a System app is responsible to hold the SET_WALLPAPER_COMPONENT permission.
Android 14 supports Live wallpaper on both the screens
Moving ahead with another code change then Google appends a method namely isLockscreenLiveWallpaperEnabled() to WallpaperManager. This is to check for the new independent lock screen live wallpaper feature is enabled. In Android 14, the new method “will return true if the new wallpaper logic is enabled. It means if the lock screen wallpaper always uses a wallpaperService and not a static image.” Also, the ‘wallpaperService’ refers to the API that apps use to execute a live wallpaper service.
So far, the “independent lock screen live wallpaper” feature presently is not there in the Android 14 Developer Preview. It is because of the reason, its config is disabled by default in AOSP. Therefore, when the config value is set to return true via runtime resource overlay (RRO) in Android 14 DP2. Then the Pixel’s “Wallpaper & Style” app displays the options that allow the user to set an independent live wallpaper on the lock screen. While it doesn’t work that way, rather, the Live Wallpaper Picker sets it, on both screens.
It’s probably because this feature is being added in order to board new devices such as the Pixel Tablet. At the same time, it’s still a significant change that most of the user desire curiously.
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