There is no shortage of cool ways to find high-resolution wallpapers on Android, and because these kinds of services can run in the background, it’s easy to set it and forget it.
But TapDeck, from German developer TapTap Mobile, looks to add a social element to the proceedings. The app loads up popular still images as wallpapers that can be cycled (on most launchers – it’s finicky with some older or more obscure ones) by double-tapping on any unused part of the screen. The algorithm tries to learn your preferences based on a single “heart” function that can be accessed, along with some details of the photo, by swiping up on any unused area of the screen.
In beta for the past few months, TapDeck has grown to support a number of social features, including the ability to “Drop” a photo to a friend, or “Retap” a photo to one’s stream. There’s an Instagram-like quality to the main feed, though users can not submit photos themselves (in this version, at least), only engage with existing content.
The low-friction discovery method works quite well, but it would be for nought if the photos weren’t generally pleasing to look at, and appropriate to use as wallpapers. Many of the photos are simple landscape shots, but there are some portraits and more abstract inclusions. To be honest, there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for which photos flow into one another, though most of them are sourced through Flickr’s extensive Creative Commons-licensed database.
Much of the social interaction will rest on whether TapTap can turn TapDeck into a flourish network of image likers and sharers, but for now being a lonely image consumer is working fine for me.
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