Notes

What we learned by measuring the wallpapers in the library, and things worth knowing when you set a wallpaper on your phone.

• 2026-10-23 One in four wallpapers makes the lock-screen clock hard to read We measured the top of all 1,083 wallpapers in the library: 23.5% are bright enough to swallow a white clock. Brightness isn't the whole story, though. Fine texture matters too.
• 2026-10-23 How many pixels of your wallpaper get cut off on iPhone 17, 16 and 15 Put a 9:16 wallpaper on a 19.5:9 screen and about 18% of its width ends up off-screen, on every model. We worked out the exact crop for each one.
• 2026-10-23 A wallpaper's color isn't decided by area Counted by area, the top color is black, at 25.3% of the library. It matched our hand-assigned color tags only 26.6% of the time, and on closer inspection the tags weren't wrong.
• 2026-10-23 Wallpapers that make home-screen icon labels hard to read We measured the brightness of the bottom quarter of each wallpaper. Conditions are better than on the lock screen, with only 9.6% causing trouble, but just 12.7% are smooth enough to work as a plain backdrop.
• 2026-10-23 The wallpapers here come in three resolutions. Is 1080×1920 enough? Half of them are 1080×1920, which the latest iPhones scale up 1.49×. We look honestly at whether that actually causes problems, with the real scaling figures.
• 2026-10-23 Do black wallpapers really save battery? We measured the share of truly black pixels in every wallpaper, and nearly half came in under 5%. Looking dark and being switched off on an OLED screen are not the same thing.