Hey everyone,

With the recent buzz around Android 17 introducing more precise custom color sliders and palettes for Material You (examples on reddit here, here and here), I wanted to share a project I’ve been maintaining for years that does exactly that—even for older versions of Android!

It’s called LWP+ (Live Wallpaper Plus).

🎨 The core trick: Dictate your own Dynamic-Colors

Instead of letting the OS algorithm guess the accent colors based purely on your wallpaper, LWP+ acts as a bridge. It hosts your chosen background content but allows you to explicitly choose the exact Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors reported to the system. The OS then uses your custom selections to generate the global system palette (notification drawer, volume bar, themed icons, etc.), completely independent of what your wallpaper actually looks like.

✨ What else can it do?

LWP+ is packed with full wallpaper customization features:

• Choose Your Content: Use solid colors, static images, animations (GIF, WEBP, APNG), or videos as your active live wallpaper.
• Smart Scaling & Layouts: Supports transparent images/animations with custom background colors, multiple scaling modes (Center Crop, Fit Center, Center Inside), and optional horizontal scrolling.
• Double-Tap Shortcuts: Lock your device instantly or turn off the screen by double-tapping the home screen (uses admin, accessibility, or root).
• Easy Setup: Includes an interactive built-in tutorial to check system compatibility and guide you through triggering the OS palette refresh.

🧪 Advanced experimental flags (YMMV!)

I’ve also included a couple of experimental toggles leveraging underlying Android system hints. Note: These rely heavily on your launcher, device OEM, and Android version, so they might not do anything on certain setups!

• Force Dark Text: It hints to the OS that dark text is preferred over the wallpaper (often useful for forcing high-contrast dark text on the lock screen). It might also change the text color of the labels of the apps and the status bar icons and text, too.
• Force Dark Theme (for old Android versions): It tells the system that a dark theme is preferred for the best presentation (e.g., trying to trick a launcher into turning its app drawer background black).

So, if you are on an older version of Android (or even running the latest builds and want granular three-color reporting), give it a spin! It's completely free, all features included.

Feel free to ask any questions or drop feedback below! 🚀

Link to the Play Store here.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here).

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone,

With the recent buzz around Android 17 introducing more precise custom color sliders and palettes for Material You (examples on reddit here, here and here), I wanted to share a project I’ve been maintaining for years that does exactly that—even for older versions of Android!

It’s called LWP+ (Live Wallpaper Plus).

🎨 The core trick: Dictate your own Dynamic-Colors

Instead of letting the OS algorithm guess the accent colors based purely on your wallpaper, LWP+ acts as a bridge. It hosts your chosen background content but allows you to explicitly choose the exact Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors reported to the system. The OS then uses your custom selections to generate the global system palette (notification drawer, volume bar, themed icons, etc.), completely independent of what your wallpaper actually looks like.

✨ What else can it do?

LWP+ is packed with full wallpaper customization features:

• Choose Your Content: Use solid colors, static images, animations (GIF, WEBP, APNG), or videos as your active live wallpaper.
• Smart Scaling & Layouts: Supports transparent images/animations with custom background colors, multiple scaling modes (Center Crop, Fit Center, Center Inside), and optional horizontal scrolling.
• Double-Tap Shortcuts: Lock your device instantly or turn off the screen by double-tapping the home screen (uses admin, accessibility, or root).
• Easy Setup: Includes an interactive built-in tutorial to check system compatibility and guide you through triggering the OS palette refresh.

🧪 Advanced experimental flags (YMMV!)

I’ve also included a couple of experimental toggles leveraging underlying Android system hints. Note: These rely heavily on your launcher, device OEM, and Android version, so they might not do anything on certain setups!

• Force Dark Text: It hints to the OS that dark text is preferred over the wallpaper (often useful for forcing high-contrast dark text on the lock screen). It might also change the text color of the labels of the apps and the status bar icons and text, too.
• Force Dark Theme (for old Android versions): It tells the system that a dark theme is preferred for the best presentation (e.g., trying to trick a launcher into turning its app drawer background black).

So, if you are on an older version of Android (or even running the latest builds and want granular three-color reporting), give it a spin! It's completely free, all features included.

Feel free to ask any questions or drop feedback below! 🚀

Link to the Play Store here.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here).

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone,

With the recent buzz around Android 17 introducing more precise custom color sliders and palettes for Material You (examples on reddit here, here and here), I wanted to share a project I’ve been maintaining for years that does exactly that—even for older versions of Android!

It’s called LWP+ (Live Wallpaper Plus).

🎨 The core trick: Dictate your own Dynamic-Colors

Instead of letting the OS algorithm guess the accent colors based purely on your wallpaper, LWP+ acts as a bridge. It hosts your chosen background content but allows you to explicitly choose the exact Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors reported to the system. The OS then uses your custom selections to generate the global system palette (notification drawer, volume bar, themed icons, etc.), completely independent of what your wallpaper actually looks like.

✨ What else can it do?

LWP+ is packed with full wallpaper customization features:

• Choose Your Content: Use solid colors, static images, animations (GIF, WEBP, APNG), or videos as your active live wallpaper.
• Smart Scaling & Layouts: Supports transparent images/animations with custom background colors, multiple scaling modes (Center Crop, Fit Center, Center Inside), and optional horizontal scrolling.
• Double-Tap Shortcuts: Lock your device instantly or turn off the screen by double-tapping the home screen (uses admin, accessibility, or root).
• Easy Setup: Includes an interactive built-in tutorial to check system compatibility and guide you through triggering the OS palette refresh.

🧪 Advanced experimental flags (YMMV!)

I’ve also included a couple of experimental toggles leveraging underlying Android system hints. Note: These rely heavily on your launcher, device OEM, and Android version, so they might not do anything on certain setups!

• Force Dark Text: It hints to the OS that dark text is preferred over the wallpaper (often useful for forcing high-contrast dark text on the lock screen). It might also change the text color of the labels of the apps and the status bar icons and text, too.
• Force Dark Theme (for old Android versions): It tells the system that a dark theme is preferred for the best presentation (e.g., trying to trick a launcher into turning its app drawer background black).

So, if you are on an older version of Android (or even running the latest builds and want granular three-color reporting), give it a spin! It's completely free, all features included.

Feel free to ask any questions or drop feedback below! 🚀

Link to the Play Store here.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here).

Thanks for reading!

This is the app (called "LWP+"), and I've shown here the video that I've published there:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lb.lwp_plus

At first I was happy about what I created on the video, but then I thought that it looks more like a tutorial here, instead of maybe focusing on what's the most interesting. Surprisingly, ever since I've published the video, it actually got quite some views already (29 after 2 days), despite the fact it's a bit of a niche app. Still, I think maybe it can be improved.

I want to know what you guys think about the video (which has audio, BTW).

Here's about the app:

It's a live wallpaper app, that has these features:

1. Allows showing color/image/animation/video as content (users choose the file from the file system). No special effects so some users that complain about the dimming/zooming effects actually like using it. Users can also choose whether it should scroll or the type of automatic cropping.

2. Allows (some) control over the Material-You colors of the OS, as it lets users to choose the colors to report the OS about what's on the wallpaper. This means that like on Android 17, users can choose the colors they want (if the OS supports it) despite the content not matching it.

3. Setting of double-tap to lock the screen. Some launchers don't offer this, so I added it to the app too.

4. Some extra flags that (on some devices) should affect colors further, such as black/white text and/or black/white icons on status bar and/or lock screen and/or launcher.

The app is completely free, ad-based. Users can remove the ads including by just watching full screen ads. Originally it was created to offer dark-theme on devices as it wasn't a toggle on the OS settings, and was based on the colors of the wallpaper.

Hey everyone!

I developed my first educational app, VocaLearn, and I wanted to share it with you all.

The idea is simple: it’s like those classic talking animal toys where you point to an animal, and it tells you its name and sound. I wanted to create a version for my phone that was better than the physical toy.

How is it different?

• 🖼️ Real Photos: Instead of cartoons, the app shows beautiful, high-quality photos of each animal.
• 🌍 Dozens of Languages: You can easily switch languages in the settings to teach your child words in their native tongue or even introduce a new one.
• 🔊 Lots of Content: It currently features 120 different photos and real sounds to keep it fresh and interesting.
• 👍 Super Simple: The interface is designed to be easy for tiny hands to use. Just tap and learn!
• ❤️ Completely Free: All features and content are available for free.

My goal was to create a simple, high-quality educational tool for parents to use with their toddlers. It's a fun way to sit with them for a few minutes and help them expand their vocabulary.

A quick note on ads: The app is ad-supported to help me continue developing it. If you and your little one enjoy it and want an uninterrupted, offline experience, there are options in the app to make it completely ad-free forever. All ads are shown only before the gameplay.

I would be thrilled if you could try it out and let me know what you think. All feedback is welcome!

Link to the Play Store here.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here). There are also promo codes available for my other apps here.

How I made it:

While I am an Android developer for a long time, this time I used AI in many ways. For code I used Gemini (website and also in Android Studio itself), ChatGpt, and Cursor, and of course myself to check it out. For images I used the original ones but with some modifications using pokecut and pixelcut websites. For the drawings I used recraft-AI. For the text-to-speech I used Google and Microsoft tools. I also used Gemini for translations to many languages, and tried to verify that it writes correctly about them.

It took me a long time, especially for gathering the content and preparing it.

Thanks for reading!

I tried to search here and found only this question from 5 years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Emoji/comments/oymz0i/does_anyone_know_how_to_download_twemoji/

But, what gets downloaded is just the glyphs, as that's what's on the repository here.

How do you get a simple TTF file out of them all?

I also tried to ask on other places a few months ago, such as here.

I wanted to use it for the countries flags, for my Android apps, as I don't like the wavy style of what Google has for them, and I like the Twemoji style more for them.

I tried to create the file a long time ago and also tried to download a new version of it, but it always had issues such as being huge and also having issues with digits being shown. Or it wasn't up-to-date.

That's why for the time being I also created a solution for myself (and others if they want it) , and wrote about it here.

From Admob's page:

>Google Mobile Ads SDK is in maintenance mode. For the latest updates and features, migrate and set up GMA Next-Gen SDK.

https://developers.google.com/admob/android/choose-networks

Has anyone made the switch and noticed any difference in revenue? I wonder if it affects revenue as they claim (here).

I actually asked about this a long time ago (here), and at least for me, on the few apps that I've migrated it to, I didn't notice much of a change. Then again, I didn't do it on popular apps yet, especially on my main app.

Hey everyone!

I recently developed and released a new version of my first educational app, VocaLearn, and I wanted to share it with you all.

The idea is simple: it’s like those classic talking animal toys where you point to an animal, and it tells you its name and sound. I wanted to create a version for my phone that was better than the physical toy.

How is it different?

• 🖼️ Real Photos: Instead of cartoons, the app shows beautiful, high-quality photos of each animal.
• 🌍 Dozens of Languages: You can easily switch languages in the settings to teach your child words in their native tongue or even introduce a new one.
• 🔊 Lots of Content: It currently features 120 different photos and real sounds to keep it fresh and interesting.
• 👍 Super Simple: The interface is designed to be easy for tiny hands to use. Just tap and learn!
• ❤️ Completely Free: All features and content are available for free.

My goal was to create a simple, high-quality educational tool for parents to use with their toddlers. It's a fun way to sit with them for a few minutes and help them expand their vocabulary.

A quick note on ads: The app is ad-supported to help me continue developing it. If you and your little one enjoy it and want an uninterrupted, offline experience, there are options in the app to make it completely ad-free forever. All ads are shown only before the gameplay.

I would be thrilled if you could try it out and let me know what you think. All feedback is welcome!

Link to the Play Store here.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here). There are also promo codes available for my other apps here.

Thanks for reading!

In most of my apps, I have native ads and banner ads as fallback (usually MREC size).

It was almost always this way, in this order: first it tries loading native ads, and then if failed, it shows banner ads. The reason is that for some time I gave them both a chance, to see which gives me more revenue.

Over the past 3 weeks or so, only for one of my apps (all others are still fine), the eCPM of the native ads dropped a lot, while the banner ads are just fine. Sadly it's also the most popular apps of mine too, which gives me the most revenue. It's also weird because before the big drop, the ads were actually performing very well.

That's despite the fact that the apps share the same UI/UX and code to handle the ads, as much as I could.

Thankfully I still had my remote-configs ready for this (used them to decide which one should be prioritized), so I used it to use banner ads as first priority instead. This is one of the tips I've gathered over the years (written here if anyone is interested).

I've put here a screenshot comparing what happened to the most popular ad-unit for native ads vs the most popular ad-unit for banner-ads, over the past 30 days compared to previous 30 days, looking at Admob only (I use mediation). If I change to show all ad-networks, it's 5->6 USD change for banner ads, and 6->5 USD change for native ads.

Can anyone confirm something weird is going on in the past 3 weeks or so about native ads?

Is there anything special going on in the end of May this year, or maybe every year?

Hey everyone!

I recently developed and released a new version of my first educational app, VocaLearn, and I wanted to share it with you all.

The idea is simple: it’s like those classic talking animal toys where you point to an animal, and it tells you its name and sound. I wanted to create a version for my phone that was better than the physical toy.

How is it different?

• 🖼️ Real Photos: Instead of cartoons, the app shows beautiful, high-quality photos of each animal.
• 🌍 Dozens of Languages: You can easily switch languages in the settings to teach your child words in their native tongue or even introduce a new one.
• 🔊 Lots of Content: It currently features 120 different photos and real sounds to keep it fresh and interesting.
• 👍 Super Simple: The interface is designed to be easy for tiny hands to use. Just tap and learn!
• ❤️ Completely Free: All features and content are available for free.

My goal was to create a simple, high-quality educational tool for parents to use with their toddlers. It's a fun way to sit with them for a few minutes and help them expand their vocabulary.

A quick note on ads: The app is ad-supported to help me continue developing it. If you and your little one enjoy it and want an uninterrupted, offline experience, there are options in the app to make it completely ad-free forever. All ads are shown only before the gameplay.

I would be thrilled if you could try it out and let me know what you think. All feedback is welcome!

Link to the Play Store here.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here). There are also promo codes available for my other apps here.

Thanks for reading!