Questions, bugs and ideas: shubham@verita-ai.com
An iPhone on iOS 26. Dotwall is an iPhone app; it opens on an iPad in compatibility mode but the wallpaper it draws is sized for the iPhone screen. Everything works without an account, an internet connection or Apple Intelligence.
Three tabs along the bottom. Words: type anything up to 90 characters into the field under the preview and the dots redraw as you type. Year: one dot for every day of this year, past days lit, today in your accent colour; there is nothing to set. Life: pick your birthday and a lifespan from 60 to 100 years; one dot per week, the current week in your colour. Under the preview are four tools: the tab's own input, Look, Colour and Place, and a Save button.
The Place tool has Move and Size sliders with the same click points, and a Reset that puts the dots back.
iOS does not let an app change your wallpaper directly, which is why those two taps in Photos are needed. The image is drawn at your iPhone's exact pixel size, so choose no crop or zoom and it will fit edge to edge.
Today's dot moves every day, and a saved image does not. Shortcuts can redraw it for you each night:
Dotwall has an Open Shortcuts button in Settings and in the How to sheet (the question mark in the toolbar). The action uses whatever look, colours and layout you last chose in the app.
Touch and hold your Home Screen, tap the plus in the corner, search Dotwall, and add Year in dots in small, medium or large. It is drawn in your look and ground colour and redraws itself each day.
If you declined the Photos prompt, Save shows a line over the preview: Photos access is off, Open Settings. Tap it, or go to Settings, Apps, Dotwall, Photos, and choose Add Photos Only. Dotwall never needs more than that and never reads your library.
The lock screen has a band at the top for the date, the clock and widgets, roughly the top third of the screen, and a strip at the bottom for the Flashlight and Camera buttons. Dotwall sizes the dots to fit between them by default, and draws the clock on the preview so you can see the real layout. You can still drag the dots anywhere between the status bar and the home indicator if you want them under the clock or over the dock.
When the field is empty the preview draws a placeholder so it is never blank. Type anything and it is replaced.
Eight looks: Halftone, Board, Quiet, Pixel, Gradient, Neon, Flipdot and Stipple. In Year and Life some of them draw the grid the same way; they differ most in Words. The Colour tool has eight ground swatches (Black, Graphite, Navy, Wine, Moss, Paper, Cream and Sky) and eight dot choices (Auto, White, Black, your accent, its deeper shade, Amber, Pink and Lime), each with a system colour picker for anything else. Auto means ink that reads on the ground: white on dark, near black on light.
Settings has eight accents (Blue, Teal, Mint, Green, Yellow, Orange, Pink, Purple). The accent colours today's dot, the Gradient and Neon looks, and the buttons. Below it are sixteen app icons, each accent on a dark or a light ground, independent of the accent you use in the app.
Settings, Reset Dotwall, clears your words, birthday, look and colours. Deleting the app does the same. Wallpapers you saved stay in Photos. Since Dotwall never uploads anything, there is nothing anywhere else to delete.