What Vivid Walls Does Not Do
Every app page tells you what an app is good at. This is the other list, written by the people who made it, so you can decide before you install rather than after.
The download is free now, so the cost of trying Vivid Walls is a few minutes rather than money. That makes an honest limits page more useful than a persuasive one. If something on this list is a dealbreaker for you, better that you find out here than three days in.
Nothing below is a secret. Most of it we already say in support email, one item at a time, to whoever asks.
It does not render every Wallpaper Engine wallpaper correctly
This is the big one, and it is the honest answer to the question most people actually want answered.
Vivid Walls runs the majority of Wallpaper Engine scene wallpapers, along with video, web, GIF and static image wallpapers. It does not run all of them. Some scenes come out with visible differences from how they look on Windows, a wrong colour, an effect that is missing, motion that is not quite right. A smaller number do not render usefully at all.
We are not going to pretend a number here, because the honest version is that it depends entirely on which wallpapers you own. A library of video wallpapers will move across almost perfectly. A library of heavily scripted scenes with unusual effects will be more of a mixed result.
What we do about it is the part that matters: if one of yours renders wrong, send us the Workshop link through support and we will look at it. Rendering fixes have shipped off the back of exactly that, a reported wallpaper that came out wrong. That is a slower promise than "everything works", but it is one we can keep.
It cannot get Workshop wallpapers for you
Vivid Walls plays Wallpaper Engine wallpapers. It is not Wallpaper Engine, it is not affiliated with it, and it cannot browse or download from the Steam Workshop.
That is a limit of how Steam works rather than a decision we made. The Workshop belongs to Wallpaper Engine, which is a paid Windows application, and Steam's subscribe button only works for people who own it on their account. Wallpaper Engine has no macOS build, so the Steam client on a Mac will not offer you the app or its Workshop at all.
In practice this means Vivid Walls is only a way to bring across a library you already have on a Windows PC. There is a free Windows companion that scans your Steam library and sends it to the Mac over your own network, with no account and no cloud. If you have never used Wallpaper Engine and have no Windows machine, that whole half of the app is not available to you, and you would be using Vivid Walls as a general live wallpaper app for your own videos and the wallpapers we include.
It needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 14 or later
There is no Intel build. Vivid Walls requires an Apple Silicon Mac, meaning M1 or later, running macOS 14 or later. If you are on an older Mac or an older macOS, the App Store will not let you install it, and that is not something a future update will change for Intel.
There is also no iPhone or iPad version, and none is in progress. iOS does not let a third party app draw the home screen background, so this is not a matter of us getting around to it.
What locks after three days, and what does not
The free download is genuinely free, but it is worth being precise about which parts stay free, because "free" on the App Store can mean several different things.
- The eight animated wallpapers included with the app stay free forever. No time limit, no countdown. If those are all you want, you never pay anything.
- Importing your own files and your Wallpaper Engine library is on a 3-day trial. For those three days you have the whole app.
- After three days, those library features lock until a one-time $9.99 purchase unlocks the full library. It is a single purchase, not a subscription, and there are no ads.
One thing that catches people: if you bought Vivid Walls back when the app itself cost money, you are not affected by any of this. Those purchases carry the full library permanently and you will never see a paywall.
Two rough edges we know about
These are ours rather than the platform's, so they belong on this list.
Dragging a folder onto the window does nothing
If you drag individual wallpaper files onto the app window, they import. If you drag a folder, the app takes the drop and then silently does nothing. No error, no message, no new wallpaper. It looks exactly like the app is broken, and the first thing most people do after copying a library off a PC is drag the folder in.
The workaround is to use the Import Wallpapers button rather than drag and drop, which does accept folders, including Wallpaper Engine wallpaper folders. For your own videos you can select the files inside the folder and press Command-A to take the whole set at once.
This is a real defect and it is on the list to fix. It is written down here rather than left for you to discover.
A wallpaper that crashes the app can leave it crashing on launch
A small number of scenes can crash the app, and because Vivid Walls restores your last wallpaper when it opens, it could then crash again on the next launch. That leaves the app looking permanently broken when only one wallpaper is at fault.
Recovering from it takes one Terminal command, defaults delete com.vividwalls.macos state.activeWallpapers, which clears the remembered wallpaper without touching your imported library, playlists or settings. The full walkthrough is in live wallpaper not working on a Mac. Needing the Terminal at all is not acceptable, and a guard that skips a wallpaper which brought the previous launch down is in the update currently with Apple.
Things that are true of every app in this category
Worth knowing, though none of these are specific to us.
An animated desktop uses more power than a static image. Vivid Walls pauses when a full screen app is in front, drops to a lower frame rate on battery, and stops after 15 minutes with no input, all of which you can change in Settings. But a moving desktop is never going to be free, and if you are chasing the absolute longest battery life on a laptop, a still image wins.
The lock screen is also more limited than the desktop. macOS does not let an app draw the lock screen directly, so live lock screen wallpapers work by exporting a video into the format macOS accepts. That works, and it is a different mechanism with different results than your desktop wallpaper. We wrote up what macOS will and will not animate once locked separately.
What it does do
For balance, and because this page is not much use without it: Vivid Walls runs Wallpaper Engine scene wallpapers natively on macOS, along with 4K video, web, GIF and static wallpapers. Scenes can react to whatever your Mac is playing, wallpapers with music widgets show live album art, you can run a different wallpaper on each display, and it is built to get out of the way when you are working or on battery.
If the list above did not put you off, the download is free and eight wallpapers are included, so you can see how your own library behaves before deciding anything.
And if you hit something that is not on this page, tell us. This list is only as honest as it is complete, and the two rough edges above are here because somebody took the time to report them.