Making Hueyear — a live wallpaper that tracks your year without draining your battery
· Hueyear, Mobile, Flutter
Most habit trackers die the same way: you download one, use it for a week, forget to open it, and never open it again. The problem isn't motivation. It's friction.
So with Hueyear I asked a different question: what if the tracker lived somewhere you already look a hundred times a day? Your phone's wallpaper.
365 dots
The idea is simple. Your year is a grid of 365 dots. One more fills in every midnight. Tap today's dot, pick how the day felt from five animated faces — Rough, Meh, Okay, Good, Great — and that dot keeps its colour. Over months, your wallpaper slowly becomes a picture of your year.
Water and habits sit right under the dots: 💧 5/8 · 💪 ✓ · 📚. Colour the year by one habit and your streak grows on every unlock.
A real live wallpaper is hard
A static image would have been easy. But a static image can't update itself at midnight, react when you unlock, or show today's dot filling like a clock. That needs a real Android live wallpaper — and live wallpapers have a reputation for eating battery.
The answer was to animate only when it matters:
- When you unlock, the days ripple in, then the wallpaper rests.
- Between unlocks it does essentially nothing, so there's no battery drain in between.
- At midnight it redraws once, even after a restart.
The app itself is built in Flutter, while the wallpaper service and system integrations are written in Kotlin, where Android expects them.
Logging in one tap, from anywhere
If logging takes more than a second, people stop. So Hueyear lets you log from wherever you already are: the wallpaper, a free home-screen widget, the app icon, a Quick Settings tile, or an evening check-in notification. Water reminders have a "+1 glass" button inside the notification and stop once you hit your goal.
Private by default
A mood tracker is personal. Hueyear has no account, no ads and no tracking, and nothing leaves the phone. Even the optional calendar sync — which makes birthdays and festivals glow on their dots — is read-only and stays on the device.
More ways to count
Once the dot grid existed, other views followed naturally: this month, life in weeks (about 4,000 dots, one per week, coloured by life chapters), goal countdowns for exams like NEET, JEE or UPSC, and "days since" counters.
What I learned
The best place for a feature is often not inside your app at all. Meet people where their attention already is, and make the interaction so small it doesn't feel like a task.
Hueyear is live on Google Play. Want to see today on the grid? Open the Hueyear case study.