Which Wallpaper Theme Fits You?

Six quick questions about light, colour and mood. At the end you'll get the theme that matches you best — and the free app that goes with it.

What the six questions are actually asking

The quiz is not a personality test. Each question maps to one property of an image that decides whether it survives being used as a phone background, and the sixteen themes are scored against all six together rather than matched on any single answer.

• Time of day. This is really a question about tonal range. Bright-morning answers push towards the high-key collections — Washington DC's marble, Paris in flat daylight. Neon and late-night answers push towards low-key sets where most of the frame sits near black.
• What pulls your eye. Subject affinity: architecture, nature, illustration, or pure mood. This is the only question that can move a theme by three points, because someone who wants animals will not be talked into a skyline.
• Colour temperature. Warm stone and golden hour on one side, cool steel and blue hour on the other. This matters more than people expect, because Android lifts a system accent colour out of your wallpaper and a warm image gives a very different interface than a cool one.
• Tolerance for detail. A busy frame and a calm frame can both be beautiful; only one of them keeps your icon labels readable. This question decides whether you get a macro study or a wide view.
• System theme. If you run dark mode, a bright wallpaper undoes half of it, and on an AMOLED panel it also costs the battery saving. Answering dark here weights the night collections heavily.
• Which screen matters to you. Lock screens have a clock and nothing else; home screens have an icon grid, a dock and widgets. An image that works on one often fails on the other, so the recommendation shifts depending on which one you actually look at.

Why a quiz rather than a grid of thumbnails

A grid of sixteen thumbnails answers the question “which of these do I find prettiest?” That is rarely the same as “which of these will I still be happy with in a fortnight?” Wallpapers are chosen in a gallery and lived with behind a clock, a notification shade and thirty icons, and the image that wins on the first test frequently loses on the second — usually because it is too bright at the top, too busy in the middle, or too saturated for the accent colour it generates.

Weighting the answers across six properties gets closer to the second question. It is still a rough instrument: it cannot know that you loathe cherry blossom, and it does not try to.

If the result does not feel right

Take the runner-up. The scoring is close between neighbouring themes by design — Tokyo and Hong Kong differ mainly in how much daylight is in the set, and Paris and Rome differ mainly in the colour of the stone. If the top answer is wrong, the second is usually the one you wanted.

It is also worth testing a candidate before committing: the wallpaper preview shows an image behind a lock-screen clock and a home-screen icon grid, which settles most arguments in about ten seconds. If you would rather work it out from first principles, how to choose a wallpaper covers the same ground at length.

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