A Mac menu bar app · not on the App Store (yet)
I built the app. Apple wants £79 ($100) before you can have it.
Wallpaperer puts the top-voted photos from your favourite subreddits on your desktop, on a schedule, with no repeats. It's finished. It's sitting on my Mac. The only thing between it and the Mac App Store is a developer licence I'd rather not pay for alone. So: £1.60 ($2) gets you early access. When the pot hits £79 ($100), I buy the licence, the app goes live, and the price becomes £4 ($5).
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See it in 40 seconds
The menu bar, the wallpaper swap, the subreddit picker and the no-repeats rule, all in one go.
How this works
It's a waitlist with a price tag and a very public goal. Nothing clever.
You pay £1.60 ($2)
You're on the list. I email you the moment there's something to download. That's the whole deal at this stage.
The pot hits £79 ($100)
I buy the Apple Developer licence (£79, about $100), sign and notarise the app, and submit it to the Mac App Store.
It goes live at £4 ($5)
Everyone on the waitlist gets a free copy. Everyone else pays £4 ($5). You saved £2.40 ($3) and funded a licence. Hero.
What you're funding
A small, native Mac app that does one thing well.
Top-voted, never repeated
Pulls the top 100 posts from each subreddit you tick, merges them, skips anything it's shown you before, and picks the highest-scoring image left.
Your subreddits
EarthPorn, SpacePorn, CityPorn, ArchitecturePorn and AerialPorn out of the box. Add any subreddit you like with one click.
On your schedule
Every 15 minutes, every hour, once a day, or only when you ask. It even catches up after your Mac wakes from sleep.
Lives in the menu bar
No Dock icon. Click the icon to see the photo's title, location, subreddit and poster, or jump to the Reddit thread.
Picky about quality
Set a minimum resolution (up to 4K), landscape only, and whether every display gets the same image or its own.
Native and tiny
Written in Swift with SwiftUI. Starts on login if you want it to. Uses about as much memory as a browser tab that's doing nothing.
The maths
For the sake of transparency, here's the entire business plan.
What if it never hits £79?
Then I'll send everyone on the list the app anyway, as a direct download that you can run on your own Mac, along with the source code. You don't lose the £1.60 and you still get the app. The App Store listing is the nice-to-have, not the product.
Pick your moment
- Free copy when it launches
- Your name in the "thank you" list in the app's More tab
- Progress emails (only when something actually happens)
- The smug feeling of having funded 2% of an Apple licence
- The same app
- Automatic updates through the App Store
- Your name in the thank-you list
- The smug feeling
Questions people have actually asked
Is this a real app or a landing page for an idea?
Real. It compiles, it runs, it has been changing my wallpaper every hour for weeks. The screenshots on this page are drawn in CSS because that was quicker than cropping, but the menu looks exactly like that.
Why not just pay the £79 yourself?
I could. But my friend suggested this and now I want to see if it works. Consider it a tiny experiment in whether 50 people on the internet want nicer wallpapers.
Which Macs does it run on?
Any Mac running macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple silicon or Intel.
Does it need a Reddit account?
No. It reads the public listings of the subreddits you pick. Nothing is posted or voted on your behalf.
What happens to the images?
They're downloaded to your Mac, set as your wallpaper, and the last 30 are kept so you can find one again. Every image belongs to the person who posted it, and the app always links back to them.
Can I get a refund?
Yes, just reply to the confirmation email. It's £1.60; I'm not going to fight you over it.