Muzei Live Wallpaper 3.2.0 is now available via the beta channel!
As the first release after the target API 26 requirement, much of the changes here are around ensuring that Muzei and the Muzei API are fully compliant with the latest versions of Android.
Legacy Sources
Let’s talk about Legacy Sources. Namely, Sources that use the Legacy API, which was fully replaced with the Muzei 3.0 API back in July 2018.
As per the Legacy Sources blog post, Legacy Sources require targeting API 25 or lower (they literally don’t work if you target API 26 or higher). This also includes Muzei’s side of the Legacy Source API. With the requirement to target API 26 or higher to be on the Google Play Store, Muzei cannot directly support Legacy Sources anymore.
If you install a Legacy Source, Muzei will now send you a notification informing you as such (so you don’t go into Muzei just to not see your newly installed source).
For a long time, I believed that this restriction meant that users upgrading to Muzei 3.2 would have no recourse at all if they wanted to continue to use a Legacy Source. However, through some significant restructuring, we now provide a separate Muzei Legacy app that allows you to continue to use Legacy Sources even in Muzei 3.2 or higher.
Given the pre-existing issues with Legacy Sources, I cannot recommend ever using a Legacy Source, particularly on API 23 and higher devices. You should still send feedback to the apps using the Legacy API to ask them to upgrade to the Muzei 3.0 API.
Light theme
One of the new features in Android Q is full support for a dark theme. Of course, Muzei had a dark theme since the very beginning so, in an ironic twist, Muzei 3.2 is adding a light theme!
With Muzei’s emphasis on the wallpaper itself, this mostly comes in changing some of the dark UI elements and cards to light, but also affects some more subtle sections (the Auto Advance screen now has a dark background instead of the blue background to avoid large blocks of relatively bright backgrounds, for example).
Muzei API 3.2.0
Alongside Muzei 3.2.0 is also a new version of the Muzei API, 3.2.0. This has one important API change for those apps targeting API 29 or higher (replacing openArtworkInfo() with getArtworkInfo() to avoid starting an activity from the background). It also officially deprecates the Legacy API and switches to AndroidX.
Try out Muzei 3.2.0 now!
Of course, like any new release, we’ve also squashed a ton of bugs, made a lot of reliability improvements, and have tuned a lot small things:
- We’ve updated the Auto Advance icon on the Sources screen to better match its functionality (it now looks like a timer)
- When Muzei is your active wallpaper, going to settings from the Live Wallpaper picker will open the full Muzei experience, allowing you to change your selected Source and other options without finding the app icon in your launcher
- Muzei now supports multi-window mode and has better support for foldable devices
Check out Muzei 3.2 by joining the beta channel and downloading Muzei from the Google Play Store.
