Refresh Wallpaper App for Android
Refresh your phone’s wallpaper every time you turn the screen on. Browse through a huge gallery of beautiful photography and pick the ones you want to see. Refresh will show your favorite images as wallpapers on your home screen.
I made this app because I got bored of looking at the same wallpaper all the time. It originally started out sourcing images from interfacelift. Their REST API became unreliable at some point and I could no longer depend on it as the source of imagery for the app. I switched out the interfacelift API for several different Reddit threads, adding categories along the way. The current version of the app lets you choose from space, beach, desert, winter, and sky pictures.
Using Reddit as a source for images had it’s own challenges. The Reddit API provides the list of posts in the thread, but the actual image URLs are links to external image hosting providers (Flickr, 500Px, and Imgur to name a few). Sometimes users will post a link directly to the image, which makes it very easy to download in app. However, when a user posts a link to a page on the hosting site, downloading the image becomes problematic. To work around this, I wrote some custom logic for downloading images from 500px and imgur. Making Flickr and Mediafire play nicely was too much work for v1, so I added logic to ignore content hosted there.
