Android 14 tipped to allow different live wallpaper for lock and home screen
A different type of aesthetic will be coming to Android phones via Android 14. According to sources, Android 14 will allow different live wallpaper for lock and home screen.
Android has supported live wallpapers since Android 2.0 Eclair was introduced in 2009, however, the operating system now only allows you to set a single live wallpaper for both the home and lock screens. Why can’t you set a distinct live wallpaper for lock and home screen as you can for static wallpapers? The answer appears to be “because it hasn’t been deployed yet,” however this may change with Android 14. Android 14 is working on adding the ability to create a different live wallpaper for lock and home screen.
Spotted details about Android 14’s “different live wallpaper for lock and home screen”
Folks at xdadevelopers discovered many code modifications that prepare for allowing an “independent lock screen live wallpaper” functionality when searching through the source code for Android 13 QPR2, which was published last week.
One change adds a new method called setWallpaperComponentWithFlags to Android’s WallpaperManager class (). This method may be used by system apps that have the SET WALLPAPER COMPONENT permission, such as Android’s Live Wallpaper Picker app, to “set the live wallpaper [component] for the provided screen(s),” such as the home screen, lock screen, or both displays.
Google introduced a function to WallpaperManager called isLockscreenLiveWallpaperEnabled() to check if the new independent lock screen live wallpaper feature is active. The new method in Android 13 “is essentially a stub function that always returns false,”
However in 14, it “will return true if the new wallpaper logic is enabled, i.e. if the lock screen wallpaper always utilizes a wallpaper Service and not a static picture.” WallpaperService is the API that applications use to implement a live wallpaper service, therefore when the “new wallpaper logic” option is set, the lock screen will support presenting live wallpapers that utilize this standard API.
The feature “independent lock screen live wallpaper” is not yet available in the Android 14 Development Preview. Because SystemUI verifies the value of config independentLockscreen LiveWallpaper before activating the new wallpaper logic, this is the case.
While this configuration is presently disabled by default in AOSP and public Android 14 previews, the lock screen in current releases continues to support only static wallpapers. Also, the Live Wallpaper Picker app has been updated to accommodate the new API for setting a live wallpaper for the lock screen, since it now puts the user-selected live wallpaper on both the home and lock screens.
