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Tessera vs Muzei: Daily Art Wallpaper Apps Compared (2026)
By the llcloud team 5 min read
The short answer
Pick Muzei if you want a free, open source live wallpaper that blurs the day's artwork behind your icons and can pull from other sources through its API. Pick Tessera if you want a still painting on both home and lock screen, framed exactly how you like, with a gallery you can browse by artist, era and style.
Muzei is a free, open source live wallpaper by Roman Nurik and Ian Lake that refreshes your home screen each day with famous art, blurring and dimming it behind your icons, and accepts other sources through an API. Tessera is a still wallpaper app that sets a public-domain painting on your home and lock screen daily, with framing previews, a browsable gallery and details for every work. Its extras come with a one-time Pro purchase.
Muzei is the app many people think of first for art on an Android home screen. It has been around for years, it is free, and its code is open. Tessera comes at the same idea, a famous painting on your phone every day, from a different angle. Here is how they differ, based on Muzei's Play listing and GitHub page and Tessera's own app page, as of October 2026.
How do Tessera and Muzei compare?
| Feature | Muzei | Tessera |
|---|---|---|
| New famous artwork every day | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wallpaper type | Live wallpaper | Still wallpaper |
| Blurs and dims art behind icons | ✓ | ✗ |
| Home screen | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lock screen | Not stated on its listing | ✓ Separately or both |
| Browse a gallery by artist, era or style | Not listed | ✓ |
| Frame the painting before applying | Not listed | ✓ Side by side Home and Lock preview |
| Details for each work | Not listed | ✓ Artist, title, style, genre, medium, museum |
| Your own photos | ✓ | ✗ |
| Other art sources through an API | ✓ | ✗ |
| Style filters and colour grades | Not listed | ✓ Pro |
| HD versions at your screen's density | Not listed | ✓ Pro |
| Hourly or custom schedules | Rotates your photos every few hours | ✓ Pro |
| Open source | ✓ Apache 2.0 | ✗ |
| Ads | ✗ None | ✗ None |
| Price | Free | Free, one-time Pro purchase |
What does Muzei do well?
Muzei is a live wallpaper, and it uses that well. Each day it refreshes your home screen with a famous work of art, then recedes into the background: it blurs and dims the artwork so your icons and widgets stay readable. Double touch the wallpaper, or open the app, to see the painting in full.
It is free, with no ads and no in-app purchases on its Play listing. It is made by Roman Nurik and Ian Lake with contributions from the Android community, and all of its code is public on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence. The featured artwork is curated daily by a small staff, with images made possible by WikiArt.org.
It is also flexible. You can rotate your own favourite photos every few hours, and Muzei offers an API so developers can build other wallpaper sources. If you like to plug things together, that is a real strength Tessera does not try to match.
Where does Muzei ask more of you?
Because the art is blurred until you tap, you see the painting clearly only when you go looking for it. Some people love that calm. Others want the painting itself on screen.
Muzei is about the daily pick rather than a library you browse. Its listing does not describe searching by artist or era, or framing the crop before it lands. And if you use a third-party legacy source, its listing says you must turn off battery optimization for that source app so it keeps loading artwork.
What does Tessera do differently?
Tessera treats your home and lock screen as a museum wall, with the painting shown in full.
- Home and lock screen. Apply a painting to either screen or both. A side by side preview shows each, with pinch to zoom framing. What you frame is exactly what lands on your screen.
- A real gallery. Filter by artist, era or style, from Impressionism and Baroque portraits to Japanese woodblock prints and Dutch Golden Age interiors. Van Gogh, Monet, Vermeer, Hokusai, Klimt, Cassatt and more than 200 other artists are in the collection.
- Know what you are looking at. Every painting shows its artist, title, style, genre, medium and museum. Pro adds the story behind it from WikiArt and Wikipedia.
- Public domain only. Every work comes from open access museum collections.
- Light on your phone. Tessera is not a live wallpaper and runs no background service to animate your screen. Paintings are fetched when you ask, cached, and work offline once saved. Rotation runs as a scheduled job that respects your battery and Wi-Fi settings.
- One-time Pro. HD masters at your screen's native pixel density, six painterly filters such as Oil paint and Mosaic, five colour grades, unlimited favourites, custom schedules including hourly, and separate Home and Lock crops.
Our guide to getting a famous painting as your Android wallpaper also shows how to do it by hand from a museum's open access collection.
What are Tessera's limits?
It is not open source, and it does not use your own photos or outside sources. It does not blur the painting behind your icons, so a busy painting can compete with them. Framing a calmer part of the work helps. It needs the internet to fetch new paintings and Android 8.0 or newer. The free version covers the daily changer and the whole gallery, while HD, filters, stories and custom schedules need Pro.
Which should you choose?
- Choose Muzei if you want a free, open source live wallpaper, you like the art blurred behind your icons, or you want to use your own photos or build your own source.
- Choose Tessera if you want the painting shown in full on your home and lock screen, you want to browse and frame works yourself, and you like knowing the story behind each one.
- Want no extra app at all? Your phone's own wallpaper picker may already rotate images daily. See Tessera vs Google's built-in wallpapers.
Both are free to try. A painting on the lock screen looks best without notifications piled over it, and a small light around the camera from AuraDisplay keeps it clean, as our guide to getting a notification light on Android explains. If saved wallpapers are filling your phone, see how to free up storage on Android, and to keep private pictures out of your gallery, how to hide photos on Android.
Sources
Questions
Is Muzei free?
Yes. Muzei's Play listing shows no ads and no in-app purchases, and its source code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence. Tessera is also free to install with no ads and no account. Its Pro upgrade is a single one-time purchase that adds HD paintings, stories, filters and custom schedules.
What is the difference between a live wallpaper and a still wallpaper?
A live wallpaper is an app that draws your background itself, so it can blur, dim or animate it. Muzei uses that to blur the artwork behind your icons until you double touch it. A still wallpaper is an image Android shows on its own. Tessera sets still images and runs no background service to animate your screen.
Can I use my own photos?
Muzei can rotate through favourite photos from your own gallery every few hours, and developers can add other sources through its API. Tessera is built around its curated collection of public-domain paintings and does not use your own photos. To set a personal photo by hand, see our guide to art wallpapers on Android.
Where do the paintings come from?
Muzei's listing says its featured artwork is curated daily by a small staff and made possible by WikiArt.org and its contributors. Every painting in Tessera is in the public domain, from open access museum collections, and each one shows its artist, title, style, genre, medium and museum.
Do these apps work on the lock screen?
Muzei's listing describes refreshing your home screen. Tessera applies a painting to the home screen, the lock screen or both, with a side by side preview of each. With Tessera Pro you can crop the two screens separately, so each frames the part of the painting you like best.
