Wallper Reaches 10,000 Mac Users
Three months after the first release, 10,000 people are running Wallper on their Macs. What that told us about the demand for live wallpapers on macOS.
Wallper passed 10,000 users this week, a little over three months after the first release.
To everyone who installed it, filed an issue, or sent an idea: thank you. None of what follows would have happened otherwise.
Three Months, Ten Thousand Macs
Version 1.0 shipped in June with three things working: video playing behind your icons, a library to choose from, and an engine light enough to leave running.
Since then there have been fourteen releases. The playback engine was rewritten in 1.0.8, Battery-Aware Mode arrived so laptops stop paying for motion nobody is watching, and a native macOS screen saver landed in August.
That pace is only possible because problems were reported quickly and precisely. A meaningful number of those releases exist because somebody described a bug well enough to fix.
What 10,000 Users Actually Tells Us
Three things, and they have shaped the roadmap more than any plan we wrote.
The demand was real and underserved. Windows has had a mature animated wallpaper ecosystem for years. On macOS the options were terminal commands, abandoned utilities, or nothing. Ten thousand people in three months, with no advertising, suggests a lot of Mac users had quietly wanted this and stopped looking.
Performance matters more than features. By a distance, the most common thing people wanted to know was whether Wallper would slow their Mac down. Not what the library contained, not how many categories there were. Whether it was safe to leave running. That question drove the engine rewrite and everything since, and the answer is kept public on the performance page.
The creator community is the engine. The library grows because people upload work they made. That is why creator credit shipped early. A community library only works if contributing to it is worth doing.
What Comes Next
Faster previews and smaller builds, so updates arrive quickly and cost little.
Continued work on the native screen saver, which is still an alpha and behaves like one in places, plus lock screen options for older macOS still on the roadmap.
Better creator tools: clearer upload status, smarter validation, and analytics further out. Publishing something and not knowing what happened to it is the most common complaint from people contributing to the library, and it is fixable.
Menu bar refinements, and smarter battery-aware behaviour.
Thank You
We will keep shipping in small, steady updates rather than saving changes for large releases, because improvements are worth more when they arrive in days than in quarters.
If you want to shape what gets built, join the Discord or open an issue on GitHub. Both are read.
From everyone at Sandimax: thank you for trusting a version 1.0. We intend to keep earning it.
