Vanderwaals

Hey Product Hunters 👋

I’m Avinash, a solo indie developer from India, and I’m excited to finally share Vanderwaals with you.

🌱 Why I Built This:

I love changing wallpapers—but I kept running into the same problems:

• Endless scrolling to find something that actually matched my taste

• Wallpaper apps that quietly track everything and push data to the cloud

• “AI” recommendations that never truly understood my aesthetic

I wanted something personal, private, and intelligent—so I built it myself.

✨ What Vanderwaals Does:

Vanderwaals is an offline, on-device AI wallpaper app that learns your visual taste over time.

It uses on-device machine learning to extract 576-dimensional visual embeddings from wallpapers and adapts based on what you like or dislike—no internet required.

You can use it in two simple ways:

1. Auto Mode
Start from scratch. Like or dislike wallpapers, and the AI gradually tunes itself to your aesthetic.

2. Personalize Mode
Upload one favorite wallpaper → instantly get 100+ visually similar results.

🔐 Privacy Is the Core Feature:

This was non-negotiable for me.

• Runs 100% offline

• No cloud ML APIs

• No analytics

• No tracking

• No data collection

• Fully open source (audit everything yourself)

Your aesthetic preferences are deeply personal—they should never leave your device.

🛠️ Built With

• Kotlin + Jetpack Compose (Material 3)

• TensorFlow Lite (on-device inference)

• Room Database

• WorkManager for automation

• Dagger Hilt

Under the hood:

• Cosine similarity for visual matching

• LAB color space for perceptual accuracy

• Exponential Moving Average (EMA) for adaptive learning

🖼️ Wallpaper Library:

• 8,000+ curated wallpapers

• GitHub aesthetic collections

• Bing’s daily photography archive

• Weekly auto-sync for fresh content

⏳ 6 Months, One Developer

This project was built during late nights and weekends. Along the way, I learned a lot about mobile ML optimization, Android’s WorkManager quirks, and how to make AI feel natural instead of robotic.

Special shout-out to Anthony La’s Paperize project—it inspired the wallpaper infrastructure.

🔮 What’s Coming Next:

• CLIP embeddings for semantic understanding

• Community-contributed collections

• Reddit sourcing (r/wallpapers, r/earthporn)

💬 AMA

Happy to answer anything about:

• Privacy-first design decisions

• Android + ML challenges

• Open-source licensing (AGPL-3.0)

• Or anything else you’re curious about

Would love your feedback 🙏

GitHub: https://github.com/avinaxhroy/Vanderwaals
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.avinas.vanderwaals

Made with ❤️ in India 🇮🇳