As a recent Android convert (and with no real Java programming experience) I thought it might be fun to try writing a live wallpaper app.

With Christmas around the corner, I figured a gentle snowfall would be the obvious choice despite there already being about a million existing snowfall apps on the Google Play store.

Anyway, I thought it came out ok 🙂 If you’d like to check it out, you can find it here.

It utilizes OpenGL for rendering and native code for the physics update, and seems to perform quite well even on older phones.

If you are interested in Android app development, this book is the absolute best one I’ve found. It seems to cover topics at a perfect pace, and the section on getting an OpenGL based live wallpaper engine set up was invaluable, as this is not officially provided in the standard Android SDK.