What is it? A slick wallpaper-making app
Who is it for? Anyone who likes to customize their lock screen
How much does it cost? Free with limited styles; $6/month or $30/lifetime unlocks everything
What makes it special? The amount of control it grants to users
Choosing a wallpaper is probably the easiest and most noticeable way to make an iPhone feel like yours. Apple bundles some nice ones with iOS – and you can even dig into the archives to find gems from years gone by – but nothing beats something designed exactly to your tastes, to match whatever case or aesthetic you’re going for.
But the wallpaper app space is a mixed bag. The majority are either curated art streams or focus on a single design type like gradients. Most are way overpriced. Minipaper sits in a different category: it’s a surprisingly powerful solo project that attempts to do it all, letting users build wallpapers from scratch across a wide range of styles.
The template library is impressive. There are gradients, mesh designs, topography maps, mountains, bento-style layouts, styles riffing on Apple’s own wallpapers, sticky note designs for putting reminders directly on your lock screen, looks inspired by classic game consoles, and a set of glass effects that complement iOS 26’s liquid glass aesthetic particularly well.
The gradient tools alone are the best I’ve seen, with support for up to 7 colors and an interface that makes juggling them feel intuitive. My favorite is dragging nodes around to sculpt a mesh gradient – a style that’s extremely popular but usually a nightmare to recreate without Photoshop. There are even Japanese-style gradient settings that give yet another distinct look.
I was impressed at how polished the styles are, each acting almost like a mini app in itself, with enough tools to make the result completely your own. You can import your own images into many of the effects, apply custom fonts, and finish things off with some great-looking grainy textures.
Minipaper offers several styles for free, but you’ll need to pay up for the really good stuff. While not exactly cheap, it manages to avoid entering into rip-off territory like the ill-fated Panels wallpaper app from last year. Many users will find a single month at $6/£6 is enough to make all the wallpaper art they could ever need.
The result is an app that’s just really fun to play around with – the kind of thing where you sit down to make one wallpaper and soon realize you’ve made a dozen.