Dawn
05:00 – 06:30Forage
A warm sunrise palette. The camel is up early, grazing while the sand is still cool.
Pre-launch page. Maru-Chari is not on the Play Store yet, so the store link, the rating, the install count and the pricing line are all placeholders. Everything else on this page — the six phases, their hour boundaries, the six behaviours and the weather override — is taken from the app's actual logic. Set maruChariIsPublished in src/lib/data.ts to remove this notice. fill the stat strip and pricing before launch
Maru-Chari, by UZG19
A desert thatknows the hour.
A live wallpaper with a single camel in the Thar. It reads your clock and your weather and lives accordingly: foraging at dawn, folded in the shade through the noon heat, huddled against a sandstorm, asleep by night. Drawn in about two dozen strokes, and quiet when you are not looking.
Android only · live wallpaper · pricing and store status not confirmed
6
Phases in the day cycle
6
Camel behaviours
TODO
Play Store rating
TODO
Installs
The loop
Set it once. Then forget it.
There is nothing to tend. The point is a wallpaper that has been getting on with its day whether or not you were watching.
01
Set it once
Pick Maru-Chari from your live wallpaper list. There is no account, no sign-in and nothing to configure: it starts reading the world immediately.
02
It reads the hour
Your local clock maps onto six phases, from dawn through the noon heat to night. The sky colour and the camel’s behaviour both follow.
03
It reads the weather
Clear, cloud, rain, storm, sand or fog. Wind bends the grass; cloud cover dims the light. Severe weather overrides the hour entirely.
04
It notices you
Unlock your phone and the camel looks up: once, briefly, then back to whatever it was doing. Acknowledgement, not a performance.
The day
Six phases, one camel.
Every boundary below is a real constant in the app, not an approximation written for this page.
Morning
06:30 – 11:00Forage
Full daylight, long shadows, the most active stretch of the day.
Noon
11:00 – 14:00Rest in shade
The heat arrives. The camel folds down and waits it out, as it would.
Afternoon
14:00 – 16:00Rest in shade
Still sitting. The peak of the day’s heat, and nothing worth walking for.
Dusk
16:00 – 21:00Walk
A warm sunset palette and the day’s second active window: the camel is moving again.
Night
21:00 – 05:00Sleep
The scene inverts to pale ink on deep blue-black. The camel is asleep, breathing.
What it does
Aware, not animated.
The difference between a looping video and this is that the camel is reacting to something real.
01
Six behaviours, not a loop
Forage, walk, rest in shade, sleep, huddle and a one-shot welcome glance. What the camel is doing is derived from the world, not played back on a timer.
02
Weather overrides the clock
A sandstorm at noon does not mean a nap in the shade. Severe weather takes priority over the hour and sends the camel into a defensive huddle, whatever the time.
03
Warm dawn, warm dusk
Sunrise and sunset get their own palettes rather than being interpolated out of a single day-to-night blend, so the two ends of the day do not look identical.
04
Wind you can see
Wind strength bends the grass and moves the camel’s tail. Cloud cover drifts and dims. The weather is in the drawing, not just in a number.
05
Monoline line art
The whole scene is around two dozen strokes. Hierarchy comes from line weight rather than colour, which is why it stays legible behind a home screen full of icons.
06
Rendered natively
The wallpaper runs on the native Rive runtime inside an Android WallpaperService, drawing straight into the wallpaper surface at full resolution.
The fine print, up front
A wallpaper should cost you nothing.
It stops when you are not looking
The render loop and the animation clock both halt the moment the wallpaper is hidden: behind an app, on the lock screen, or with the screen off. A wallpaper you cannot see should not cost you anything, and this one does not.
No account, no tracking
There is nothing to sign into and no analytics. The app reads your clock and, if you allow it, a coarse weather condition for your area. That is the entire list.
Works with no connection
Weather is a nicety, not a dependency. With no network the scene falls back to clear conditions and keeps running the full day cycle from your device clock alone.
Questions
Asked, answered.
Will this drain my battery?
It should not. The wallpaper stops advancing and stops drawing whenever it is not visible, which on a normal phone is the overwhelming majority of the day. The scene itself is around two dozen vector strokes rather than a video or a particle system, so each frame it does draw is cheap.
Does it need my location?
Only if you want weather. Grant a coarse location and the scene reacts to real conditions where you are; refuse it and everything else still works, with the weather fixed at clear. Time of day comes from your device clock and never needs a permission.
Why is the camel asleep?
Because it is night where you are. The behaviour is derived from your actual local time, so between roughly 21:00 and 05:00 the scene is dark and the camel is sleeping. If you want to see the whole cycle immediately, the companion app has a slider that drives a fake clock.
Is it iPhone too?
No. iOS has no equivalent of Android’s live wallpaper, so there is nothing for this to plug into. Android only, and that is unlikely to change.
Is it free?
TODO: confirm the pricing model before launch. Currently planned as free with no ads and no in-app purchases.
Launch
Put a desert behind your icons.
Set it this evening and the camel will already be asleep. Check again at breakfast and it will be up and grazing, because that is what the hour says it should be doing.
Play listing is not live yet — this link 404s until it is published
Android onlyNo accountPauses when hidden