Overview
There’s a wide variety of quality wallpaper apps on the Google Play Store, and there’s even no shortage of wallpaper apps that feature the Material Design style in their offerings. These apps are typically well designed with a modern “Material” interface, offering sleek animations and a fluid UI. Within the wide array of wallpaper apps, Backdrops attempts to best them all.
Backdrops offers hundreds of wallpapers made in-house by the Backdrops team, as well as many more from the user community. Users can upload wallpapers themselves to be approved by the Backdrops team and shared with others. Backdrops updates the wallpaper offerings daily and offers a “Wall of the Day” which is hand-picked daily by the Backdrops team.
User Interface
As we have come to expect from most wallpaper apps, Backdrops is developed with Material Design in mind, and allows the user to navigate the app with three sections located at the top. The first section is Community, offering a pool of third-party wallpapers uploaded by the users themselves. After extensively checking many of the wallpapers I liked, I was pleased to see all of them were offered in very high resolutions which can take advantage of today’s sharpest screens. While scrolling, users can tap the heart on the bottom right of the image to save to the user’s Favorite collection, or tap the image to dive into further options like saving it to the device or setting it as your homescreen wallpaper.
The Explore tab features the “Wall of the Day” followed by all of the Backdrops exclusive wallpapers, created by the team themselves. I must say, there should be a wallpaper for everyone in here. There’s a wide variety of pictures including minimal, Material, abstract and more for just about anybody. I immediately added quite a few to my favorites after moments of scrolling.
Scroll over to the last tab brings you to your Favorites, and gives you the option to use Muzei to cycle your favorites on your homescreen periodically.
In-App Purchases
Yikes, we all hate those words. Backdrops does need to support itself though, as it displays ads throughout the app and offers certain collections of wallpapers only available through purchasing them. The Collections tab, which can be accessed by the app’s hamburger menu on the left, offers the “Trinity” collection, “Be Together”, and “Pro Pack”.
The Trinity collection is really just for Pink Floyd fans, or users who really like having a colorful triangle as their wallpaper. Be Together offers pictures for die-hard Android fans that mostly feature the Nexus logo and the Android mascot, but this collection is free anyway. The Pro Pack… is nice and all, but don’t purchase the pro version of this app just for those. It’s a bonus, but they aren’t much better looking than the ones you’ll find in the rest of the app.
Conclusion
Backdrops offers the best of what a modern wallpaper app should be, from a beautifully designed interface to an arsenal of eye-pleasing content. I liked the design of this app so much that I purchased the pro version just so the ads wouldn’t ruin it for me. Backdrops definitely takes the spot as my go-to wallpaper app.
Download Backdrops for free from the Play Store here
