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Google’s latest Android 16 beta adds a bunch of new wallpaper and lock screen options for Pixel phones, including live-updating weather animations and a feature that automatically frames subjects of photos within a variety of bubbly shapes.
When you select an image to use as a wallpaper in the beta, you can tap the sparkly collection of starbursts that has become the de facto symbol for AI features to access the new effects. One of them, “Shape,” washes your screen in a solid color, with a punchout frame in the middle centered on the subject of your photo, be it a person, animal, or object. You can choose from five different shape options: a slanted oval, rounded rectangle, an arched opening, a flowery shape, and a hexagon. It’s a little like the iOS “Depth Effect” feature that partially obscures the clock on your lock screen with a person’s head.
Right now, your phone picks what part of the image should be the subject, with no option to resize or reposition it. In a picture of two cats that my colleague Dominic Preston tried, the phone automatically centered the frame on one of the cats, with no option to use the other instead.
A new “Weather” option interacts with the subject of your photo, like by pelting them with raindrops or wrapping them in fog. The default choice, “Local,” changes the effect depending on nearby weather conditions, but you can pick fog, rain, snow, or sun if you’d rather use one persistent effect. These options join the previous “Cinematic” wallpaper mode that automatically creates a parallax effect, moving your subject around the background of the image when you tilt your phone. That feature is now activated with a toggle labeled “Add 3D motion to this photo” and produced slightly different results when I tried it out with the same image.
Google is also testing updates to the lock screen, including offering more control over what notifications appear there. For instance, the beta now has a toggle for “Show seen notifications” that, when turned off, will hide notifications you’ve already seen.
Finally, 9to5Google spotted that a blog post from Google’s I/O conference offers a look at its “Live Updates” feature, which, like iOS’s Live Activities, presents live-updating lock screen elements showing you when, say, your Uber driver is arriving. In the GIF above, you can see what aspects like its progress bar and time estimates will look like.
