Have you ever wanted to have instant access to your Google Earth location on your phone without having to jump through hoops? Now you can use Android’s Live Wallpaper feature, together with Skyline, to always have a downloaded 3D world terrain data location of your choice as your wallpaper.
Skyline takes aerial & satellite imagery & creates beautiful interactive 3D images of any location you choose, putting them right on your home screen. As you swipe between pages on your phone you’ll get a slightly shifted view of your location’s imagery. If you rotate the phone the images will shift, creating a sense of depth (parallax effect).
The app can be installed from Google’s Android Play Store here & costs US $1.99. It was developed by independent, Changsha, China-based coder & designer Justin Fincher. To use it, just install the app & let it determine your location through the phone’s GPS, or if you prefer you can search for any location you want.
After picking a location, zoom in or out to get your preferred vantage point & then confirm the wallpaper. You can use the settings to vary zoom & depth at any time, & with Android Oreo 8.1 or newer your phone’s UI theme & menu colors will match up to the terrain color of the imagery. There’s also a scene shift effect that animates your terrain images when you unlock your phone or you swipe on launcher pages.
New features are already being worked on & will soon make their way to the app via free updates, like automatic GPS following that will change your wallpaper imagery automatically when you change your location.
You should take into account that since a Mapbox service is used, the satellite imagery in Skyline might be slightly outdated. Some launchers may not get the rotation-type animation while scrolling across launcher pages as they don’t support the scroll API, so you should use the Nova/Action launcher to fix this.
Click here to download Skyline on your Android device.
– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –
Image Credit: Skyline
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