Wallper 1.3.5.1: Lock Screen Live Wallpapers Now Require macOS 26
Lock screen video wallpapers now require macOS 26 Tahoe. Here is why we removed the feature on older macOS instead of shipping a workaround that breaks.
This release removes a feature, which is not a sentence anyone enjoys writing.
From 1.3.5.1, live wallpapers on the Mac lock screen require macOS 26. On earlier versions the toggle is gone. Desktop wallpapers are untouched and continue to work exactly as before, on every macOS version Wallper supports.
The reasoning follows, because a feature disappearing without explanation is worse than the feature disappearing.
What Actually Changed
The lock screen is one of the most tightly controlled surfaces in macOS, and reasonably so. It is the boundary between your Mac being yours and your Mac being anyone’s. Apple has historically not offered third-party apps a supported way to draw on it.
macOS 26 Tahoe changed that. It exposes a proper wallpaper pipeline that apps can integrate with. It is a real interface, it behaves predictably, and it does not ask anyone to weaken how their Mac is protected.
On macOS 15 and earlier no such path exists. What existed instead were workarounds: ways of persuading the system to display something it was never designed to display.
We shipped one of those in 1.3.5. It worked, for some people, some of the time.
Why "Some of the Time" Was Not Good Enough
Workarounds built against an undocumented system surface fail in a particular and unpleasant pattern. They do not fail loudly at install. They fail later, on a machine we have never seen, after a point update nobody controlled.
In practice that meant lock screens reverting to a static image without warning, wallpapers returning wrong after a restart, edge cases tied to specific hardware, and behaviour that shifted with each macOS patch release.
Every one of those is a support conversation that begins with someone believing the app is broken and ends with us explaining that the feature was never really supported to begin with.
We would rather tell you a feature is unavailable than have your Mac tell you it is available and then quietly fail. A toggle that works unpredictably is worse than a toggle that is honestly absent: the first costs you trust, the second only costs you a feature.
So on macOS 15 and earlier, Wallper now clearly shows that lock screen support is unavailable rather than offering it and failing.
If You Are on macOS 15 or Earlier
You lose the lock screen toggle. You keep everything else.
Live desktop wallpapers work exactly as they always have. The wallpaper library is unchanged, playback is unchanged, and performance behaviour is unchanged.
For motion while your Mac is locked, the native screen saver is the right answer and always was. It is an Apple-supported mechanism, it runs while the machine is locked, and Wallper can install any wallpaper as one. That flow is covered in 1.2.1, and the practical differences are set out in difference from the Aerial screen saver.
Day to day, the screen saver route delivers most of what people actually want from a live lock screen: something moving on the display while they are away from it.
If You Are on macOS 26
Nothing to do. The lock screen toggle is there, running on Apple’s own pipeline rather than a workaround, which means it should keep working across future macOS updates instead of breaking at the next one.
The full walkthrough is in how to set a live wallpaper on your Mac lock screen, and version requirements for every feature are listed under supported macOS versions. There is also a dedicated lock screen support page if something is not behaving.
The Underlying Principle
Wallper draws on parts of macOS that most software never touches. That only stays safe if we hold ourselves to the paths Apple actually supports, even when a workaround would let us ship something sooner.
We would rather be late to a feature than be the reason your Mac starts behaving strangely.
