Vivid Walls is now a free download

Vivid Walls used to cost 9.99 dollars up front. On September 2, 2026, version 1.3.0 went live and the app became a free download instead, with a one-time unlock inside it. This post exists because "free with an in-app purchase" is a phrase that hides more than it explains, and if you are deciding whether to install something you deserve the actual boundary rather than a marketing sentence.

So here is the whole thing in three lines. Eight animated wallpapers come with the app and stay free forever. Adding wallpapers of your own, including bringing a Wallpaper Engine library across from a Windows PC, is free for three days. After that, applying wallpapers you added yourself needs a single purchase that you make once and keep.

What is free forever

Eight animated wallpapers ship inside the app and load the first time you open it. They are not samples, and they are not on a timer:

• City Lights
• Aurora Scene
• Beach Scene
• Cherry Blossom
• Fireplace HD
• Nebula Journey
• Rainy Street
• Dense Forest

Any of those can sit on your desktop indefinitely whether or not you ever buy anything. When the three-day window closes they are unaffected, because the app treats the included wallpapers as a separate category that is never gated. If all you want is a moving desktop and you are happy with one of those eight, you can install the app, pick one, and never see a payment screen.

Everything around them is free too. Per-display wallpapers, the frame rate cap, the battery behaviour, pausing when a fullscreen app is in front, the playlist and scheduling controls: none of that is behind the unlock. There is no watermark on anything, and no advertising anywhere in the app.

If you want to see what those eight actually look like in motion before installing anything, there is a post with video of each one and a measured motion index for each.

What the three days cover

The trial is three days from first launch, and it covers the part of the app that handles wallpapers you supply yourself. Concretely, that means:

• Importing a Wallpaper Engine library. The import wizard, and the companion app that copies your Steam Workshop library across your local network from a Windows PC.
• Adding your own media. Dragging in your own video files, GIFs, still images or a web page to use as a wallpaper.
• Applying any of the above to your desktop or lock screen.

Three days is deliberately enough time to answer the only question that actually matters before you pay, which is whether your wallpapers work. Not a curated demo reel, not the ones we picked. Import your own library on day one and look at it. The app renders a large majority of Wallpaper Engine scenes correctly, but not all of them, and the honest thing to do is let you find that out on your own collection before any money changes hands rather than after.

If a scene of yours renders wrong, send the Workshop link to support. That is how most rendering fixes get prioritised, and it is a real queue rather than a form that goes nowhere.

What happens on day four

This is the part most apps are vague about, so to be precise:

• The eight included wallpapers keep working, exactly as before.
• Wallpapers you imported are not deleted. They stay in your library, with their thumbnails, exactly where you left them.
• What stops is applying one of them to the desktop. That is the thing the unlock buys.
• Buying the unlock later restores access to everything you already imported. You do not have to import it again.

Nothing is uninstalled, nothing expires off your disk, and there is no countdown nagging you from launch one.

What the unlock costs

The unlock is called Full Library. It is a one-time, non-consumable in-app purchase, which in App Store terms means you buy it once, it is tied to your Apple Account, and it can be restored on a new Mac at no cost. There is no subscription and no recurring charge of any kind.

Other storefronts are priced by Apple from the US tier, so the figure you see in your own App Store is the one that applies. The prices above were read from the live storefronts on September 3, 2026.

If you already bought Vivid Walls

You keep everything, and you do not pay again.

The app checks the version your purchase originally came from. If that was any 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2 release, which covers every copy sold while the app was paid up front, it grants full access automatically on launch. There is nothing to restore, no code to enter and no support ticket to file. If you bought the app at any point before September 2, 2026, this is you.

That was a deliberate condition of making the change. Moving to a free download would have been indefensible if it quietly reset the people who paid for the app first.

Why change it at all

The old model asked for 9.99 dollars before you could find out whether the app rendered your particular wallpapers. For an app whose entire value is that it runs scene files made for another platform, that is the wrong order. Plenty of people were being asked to gamble ten dollars on a question we could simply let them answer.

The trade is that the app now has to be good enough that people choose to pay after using it, rather than before. That seems like the correct pressure to be under.

What you need

• macOS 14.0 or later
• An Apple Silicon Mac, meaning M1 or later. Intel Macs are not supported.
• A Windows PC only if you want to bring an existing Wallpaper Engine library across. The companion app that does the transfer is free, needs no account and works over your local network.

If you are coming from Wallpaper Engine, the import guide walks through the transfer step by step. If you are still working out what is actually possible on macOS at all, how to get animated wallpapers on Mac covers every route, including the free ones that are not us.

Download Vivid Walls free on the Mac App Store →