About Walls & Words

Walls & Words is a solo project by Volodya Avetisyan. The name is literal. The words are five word games for Android — Proximity, Traverse, Quartet, Outlier and Huddle — all built on a single map of how English words relate in meaning. The walls are sixteen wallpaper apps, each about one subject: a city, an art style, or a category like chess or wildlife. Around both sit eight browser tools and a blog that explains how all of it works.

None of the parts exists to pad out the others. The games stand on their own; the wallpaper apps stand on their own; the blog is written to be worth reading even if you never install anything. If anything, the writing is more careful than the marketing around either kind of app usually is — I would rather tell you why a wallpaper will fight your icon labels, or why a semantic word game scores your opposite well, than push an install you will delete in a week.

Who I am

I am Volodya Avetisyan, an independent Android developer. I have been publishing apps on Google Play since the mid-2010s and have built and maintained everything on this site directly — no team, no template factory, no third-party content. Every game page and every theme page corresponds to an app I wrote and continue to look after.

My background is Android development and small-team product work. The wallpaper apps came first, out of an interest in the overlap between display technology and visual design. The word games came later, out of a different interest: what happens when you treat a word as a point in space and build games on the distances between points. The blog is where the two interests get written down.

How the games are made

• One map, shipped inside the app. Each game carries its own vocabulary and word-embedding map on the device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and the games work with no connection at all.
• Checked before they ship. Traverse bridges are verified to have a solution. Quartet grids and Outlier rounds are tested to have exactly one answer. Puzzles that fail the checks are not in the apps.
• No accounts, no timers where they do not belong. Statistics stay on your phone. The games about thinking have no countdown, and no streak punishes you for a busy day.
• Free, with advertising that stays out of the way. Never on a board while a clock runs, never on a screen being passed around, never mid-puzzle. Where an ad unlocks something, the unlock is permanent and optional.

How the wallpaper apps are made

• One clear subject per app. A city, an art style, or a category — no scattershot collections.
• Curated, not scraped. Each set is hand-picked and prepared in portrait for tall, high-density screens.
• Lightweight. Most apps are under 10 MB installed, with permissions limited to what is needed.
• Free, with minimal advertising. Modest ad placement to cover hosting; no paywalls, no interstitials on launch.

How the blog is written

Every article is written by me, edited over time, and updated when something material changes. I write about what I actually build and use — word-embedding models and the games on top of them, Android, AMOLED panels, Material You, composition for phone-shaped images. When a piece touches on research, I cite the underlying work and note its limits rather than overstate it. When a piece touches on my own implementation, it says what the design does and does not claim more than that.

Three editorial standards I try to follow:

• Specificity over generality. A claim with a number, a name, or a date is worth more than a generic assertion. Where an article has data, the data is real.
• Honest uncertainty. If an effect is small, a result is contested, or a model has a known failure mode, the article says so.
• No padding. The articles are written and edited by hand. They are meant to be the shortest version that still tells you what you need.

How this site makes money (and why that matters)

Two ways: free Google Play apps with modest in-app advertising, and (pending approval) Google AdSense on this site. Neither is large; this is a side project, not a business. I mention it because I would want to know it if I were reading a site like this, and because it shapes the editorial position: I have no financial relationship with any phone manufacturer, OS vendor, games publisher or wallpaper provider. When the blog recommends or criticises something, it is based on what I have actually used or built.

Get in touch

A bug in a game, a puzzle you think has two answers, a suggestion for a wallpaper theme, a correction to an article — all welcome through the contact page. Google Play reviews on the individual apps genuinely shape what gets built next.