In my earliest years of using Android, I often had an animated forest as my background, or fish wading through water. I forgot about live wallpapers for most of the last ten years, but now I’ve landed on a new favorite.

There’s much to love about Chill Vector Live Wallpaper. Here’s what has given it a place on the background of my phone.

Minimalist, Abstract Art

My really favorite wallpapers were often 3D, graphically intensive creations. I recall a model of a forest where the camera panned around to different parts whenever I switched home screens. Those fish I mentioned? If I tapped the water they were swimming in, it would ripple.

You can absolutely still find live wallpapers like those in the Play Store, but at some point, the effects started to feel over the top to me. And since it was not a given in those days that phones would actually make it through the end of a day, I moved toward minimalist, abstract wallpapers that were anything but live.

Chill Vector Live Wallpaper is a combination of the two. The art on display here is made entirely of vectors. The various shapes come together in a way to replicate the world around us. I’m a fan of this type of design, and I would happily take a still screenshot of any frame of this app to use as a static wallpaper. That it’s animated is a delightful plus.

Subtle, Pleasing Animations

Some live wallpapers introduce perpetual motion into the background. There’s a steady flow of rain or ripples of space-time as you travel through hyperspace. I prefer my wallpapers to be more subtle.

In this app, the layers of the foreground and background shift as I tilt my phone, creating a pleasing parallax effect. If I don’t move my phone at all, the background is sometimes completely still, save the occasional cloud drifting by so slowly, its movement is almost imperceptible.

This is the kind of visual touch that gives the background life without making it distracting or overstimulating. It’s the complete opposite, actually. This app is one that helps put me at ease.

Various Landscapes to Pick From

The app defaults to an abstract view of Mount Fuji, with trees swaying in the foreground. This is just one of eight options. Some, admittedly, aren’t landscapes at all. You can go with a view of the sky or a haven floating in the clouds that is awfully reminiscent of Cloud City from Star Wars.

I’ve gone with Chill Hills, because I live among hills in central Virginia, and this background looks not unlike the Blue Ridge Mountains not that far away. There are other options that more closely resemble the Rockies or mountain chains in other parts of the world. Though my biggest critique of the app would be that three of the right backgrounds are of mountains, and they look largely the same. It’d be nice to see a few that depict a beach or areas like California’s Redwood forests.

Four Seasons and Live Weather

The number of options can be forgiven in part because of the degree of variation available for each one. For starters, you can tap on each landscape to generate a slightly modified version. Each also has variations for each of the four seasons. Though if you’re using one of the landscapes with trees, you’re going to have to assume they’re evergreen. Leaves don’t fall here.

That said, while I’m not that into any of the mountain landscapes in the spring or summer, I love how the blues flow together in the winter. You can manually select the season you find most beautiful, have the app display one at random, or set the wallpaper to match your current season. This is the route I’ve taken, so my backdrop is currently summer.

Chill Vector Live Wallpaper also includes nine different weather patterns. These sometimes have an even larger impact on the appearance than the seasons. Chill Hills with only the sun in the sky is a very different vibe from those same hills with complete cloud cover or a light mist. I also appreciate that at certain times of day, the sky contains both the sun and the moon, with the moon in its correct phase.

A Dimmed Background

Technically, there is one live wallpaper I’ve used throughout the past decade, and that’s Muzei. I don’t think of it as a live wallpaper, because it simply dims and blurs background images, which it can also change at regular intervals. It’s the dimming and blurring that matters to me.

I find most wallpapers, animated or not, unusable due to how much they clash with app icons and what little contrast there is with text. What ultimately makes Chill Vector Live Wallpaper an option I can stick with is its built-in dimming. I have this cranked all the way up, so that my app icons and labels in Niagara Launcher pop.

While this live wallpaper pairs with default app icons just fine, it goes particularly well with minimalist icon packs. So if you do want to take this whole vibe to the next level, that’s your next step.

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