If you like live wallapapers and you absolutely love material design, then Google’s new live wallpaper from the Google Creative Lab team will probably catch your eye, and if it doesn’t, perhaps it should. Meter is essentially the mashup of a live wallpaper and material design, at least that’s the feel it gives off thanks to the use of shapes and splashes of color. Meter is much more than just a pretty and minimal visual experience though, as it also serves a functional purpose of displaying various statistics for you right on the homescreen like battery life, WiFi status, and notifications.
Essentially, these are the only three dashboard style stats that Meter lists at the moment, but since this is an experimental app from the team at Google Creative Lab there is always the small chance that they will add in other stats at some point with updates. This is a live wallpaper, so you may or may not expect it to do more than just list the details. It does though which is what might be of interest. It moves too. As you tilt your phone in any given direction the shapes will move slightly along with you. This serves no functional purpose at all but does look kind of cool and adds to the effect of the overall theme.
While you can simply apply the LWP with either WiFi or battery meter without doing anything, having the notification LWP displayed requires you to give it permission to access your notifications. If you aren’t keen on doing this, choose one of the other two. You also can’t have all three going at once obviously, as this is a wallpaper after all and you can’t have more than one wallpaper displayed at a time. There’s also unfortunately no option to have it switch out between the three on a timed interval, so anytime you want to swap it you’ll have to open up the app and do so manually. This isn’t likely to be a big deal to most users, but the ability to have it switch automatically on its own would be a nice touch. Meter is a free app, and you can grab it from the Play Store as of now if you’re curious to check it out.
