Live wallpapers on Android phones and tablets are very good. It's not a reason to buy a cell phone, but you can see typographic watches, light grids and other useful and attractive things. But are they worth it?

Live wallpaper can drain the battery in two ways: by tricking the display into blinking bright images and by requiring the processor of the mobile phone to take certain actions. On the display side, it may not be that important. To display dark colors, you need the same amount of light as light colors. It is also called AMOLED or Super AMOLED unless your phone has an OLED display. As Chris Hoffman of HowToGeek explains, the

OLED screen does not have a solid backlight. Each pixel on an OLED screen is an "organic light emitting diode" that produces its own light. If the pixel is black, no light is produced. If the pixel is white, it produces light.

Therefore, switching to black or a very dark wallpaper can save battery life for certain phones (mainly Android models). There may be some live wallpapers that move very dark objects on a very dark background, but let's assume they are very rare.

Therefore, the drain of other live wallpapers is CPU utilization. Due to the nature of the Android Market, which is generally free to experiment with, it is difficult to judge all live wallpapers at once. Some are diligent and can use system resources very efficiently, while others are fully organized over the weekend and ride on graphics and processor chips like a vengeful cowboy.

But it's worth noting that even Google's own default live wallpaper can slow things down. In his unusually positive review of Nexus 7, MG Siegler pointed out the delay in running live wallpapers and navigating the home screen. Complaints about battery theft of live wallpapers can be found in many places such as Hacker News, Quora, Tested and more.

See for yourself. In the Android device settings, select Battery and scan the list of applications that have been using the battery since it was last charged. If you have a specific live wallpaper installed, you may see it by name in this list, or you may see the live wallpaper effect on your display. You can install an app like System Tuner to see exactly where your system is consuming resources, but your phone's battery will see if there is a noticeable discrepancy between your wallpaper or display and everything else. You can find out by casually examining the history.

Live wallpapers don't consume much energy if properly designed, if you don't spend a lot of time on your home screen, and if you set the screen off immediately after you stop working. However, overall, if you want to reduce potential energy leaks, it's a good idea to start with live wallpapers.