Type anything and Dotwall draws it as a dot matrix wallpaper at your iPhone's exact size. Or let the dots be your year, or your life in weeks, with today lit up.
Coming to the App StoreiPhone, iOS 26
Words: type up to 90 characters. Year: one dot per day, nothing to set. Life: your birthday and a lifespan, 60 to 100 years.
The preview draws the date, the clock and the two bottom buttons over your wallpaper, so you see the finished screen before you save. Drag the dots out from under the clock, pinch to size them, swipe for the next look.
One tap renders a PNG at this iPhone's native pixel size and adds it to Photos. Dotwall can add photos, never read them.
Open the image, tap Share, then Use as Wallpaper. iOS gives apps no way to set the wallpaper directly, so those two taps are the hand-off.
Any text as a dot matrix. A phrase, a name, a date, a reminder to yourself. Double tap the preview to type.
Twelve columns for the months, thirty one rows for the days. Past days lit, today in your colour. Tap any dot to read its date.
Fifty two weeks across, your lifespan down. The current week is the coloured one. Tap a dot to see the week and the age it was.
Halftone, Board, Quiet, Pixel, Gradient, Neon, Flipdot and Stipple. Eight ground swatches from black to paper, eight dot swatches, and a system colour picker for both. Eight accents and sixteen app icons.
Dotwall contains no URLSession, no analytics and no third-party SDK. There is nowhere for your words or your birthday to go.
The one permission it asks for is to add images to Photos, and iOS asks the first time you tap Save. Dotwall never reads your photo library.
Your words, birthday, look, colours and layout live in the app on your iPhone. Reset in Settings clears them; deleting the app does too.
No sign-in, no subscription, no in-app purchases. Open it and type.
Dotwall gives Shortcuts an action called Get Today's Dotwall that returns today's Year, Life or Words image at this iPhone's size.
Time of Day 00:05, Get Today's Dotwall, Set Wallpaper Photo. Three steps in the Shortcuts app and the lock screen redraws itself every night. The recipe is in Settings.
A Home Screen widget in small, medium and large, drawn in your look and ground colour, redrawn every day.
Four short steps on first open, and again from Settings whenever you want them.
Exactly your iPhone's screen in pixels, read from the device when you save (1320 by 2868 on an iPhone 16 Pro Max, for example). No scaling, no crop, no watermark. It is saved as a PNG so every dot edge stays crisp.
iOS has no way for an app to change your wallpaper. Only Photos, Settings and the Shortcuts app can. Dotwall saves the image to Photos and you set it with Share, Use as Wallpaper. Two taps.
In Shortcuts, open the Automation tab, tap plus, choose Time of Day, set 00:05, Daily, Run Immediately. Add the action Get Today's Dotwall and pick Year or Life. Add Set Wallpaper Photo, choose the Lock Screen and turn Show Preview off. Every night Shortcuts asks Dotwall for today's image and sets it.
Only Life does, to know how many weeks you have had. It is stored in the app on your iPhone and nowhere else. Words and Year need nothing from you.
Nowhere. They stay in the app so the Words tab reopens where you left it. There is no networking code in Dotwall, so they cannot be sent anywhere, even by accident.