This version adds six wallpapers to the gallery and fixes three features that, each in its own way, promised more than they delivered: a step counter that only counted while the screen was on, a calendar that a single denial made permanently inaccessible, and a backup that forgot your custom icons.

Six new wallpapers

Three animated wallpapers join the gallery: Cosy Cottage and Lofi Rain in the Cosy theme, Starlit Peaks in the Mountain theme. Three forest photographs are added to the Forest theme: Misty Pines, Lone Tree, and Forest at Dawn.

A useful detail: the two animated wallpapers in the Cosy theme were filmed in landscape format. On a tablet, they fill the screen in their original framing; on a phone held vertically, they're center-cropped, so part of the scene falls outside the frame. Starlit Peaks, on the other hand, is natively vertical.

Like the other animated wallpapers, these videos aren't bundled with the app: they're downloaded the first time they're displayed, then kept on the device. The app itself only grows by 300 KB, and the wallpaper you apply stays available afterward, even offline.

The step counter only counted while the screen was on

The symptom

The counter on the left page stubbornly stayed at zero. Digging further, it turned out it did increment — but only while the page stayed on screen. Which is to say, basically never, since nobody walks around staring at their home screen.

The cause

Two mechanisms combined. First, Android: for several versions now, an app that isn't in the foreground loses access to motion sensors. While you're walking, with the screen off or another app open, Sola simply stops receiving any readings.

Second, the code itself, which set the day's "zero point" to the first reading received. Since that first reading only arrived when the page was opened, every step already taken since morning got absorbed into that zero. Your entire morning vanished at the exact moment you went to check it.

The fix

What both flaws overlooked is that the phone's sensor itself never stops counting. It keeps tallying at the hardware level, whether the app is open or not. The calculation is now based on cumulative deltas: with each reading, Sola adds the difference from the previous one.

In practice: you walk two thousand steps with your phone in your pocket, open the page, and all two thousand steps appear at once. Two edge cases are handled explicitly: restarting the phone, which resets the sensor to zero and used to leave the counter stuck until the next day, and the switch past midnight, which resets the day's count without erasing steps already taken in the early morning.

A calendar that a denial made unrecoverable

On first launch, Sola asks for calendar access to show your next appointment. If you denied it, the setting was switched off and the request was never shown again: the feature simply disappeared, with nothing indicating how to get it back.

Now, whenever the permission is missing, the home widget shows a line reading "Allow calendar access" that you can simply tap. A denial no longer disables anything — the line stays put, and you can change your mind whenever you like. If Android has permanently blocked the request after repeated denials, tapping it opens the app's settings directly.

Another addition: when access is granted but your calendar is empty, the widget now shows "No upcoming events" instead of displaying nothing at all. The absence of information is now information in itself.

Backups forgot your custom icons

The backup feature exported eight of the app's twelve data tables. Missing from the list: the custom icons introduced in the previous version, the categories you created, their renames, and their order. The images you had imported weren't included in the file either.

All of that is now backed up, images included — an icon restored without its image would just leave an empty tile.

Restore behavior has also changed. Previously, importing a backup replaced everything. Now, whatever a file doesn't describe, it doesn't touch: restoring an older backup, made before custom icons existed, no longer erases them. A message clearly tells you what couldn't be restored, and why.

One deliberate limitation: wallpapers you've imported yourself are still excluded from the backup file. They're videos weighing tens of megabytes each, and including them would make backups unwieldy to move around.

How to get the update

1.0.14 is being rolled out gradually via the Play Store. You can force a check from the Play Store app, in the "Manage apps and device" section.

Open on Google Play