1.4.3 fixed how the grid behaves when you drag something. 1.4.4 fixes what
sits behind it: a flat black rectangle where your wallpaper used to be.
## The launcher stops hiding your wallpaper
**What ships.** Background gets a third option next to black and white: the
wallpaper you already have set on your phone. Not an import, not a new
picture to choose — the one you picked before you ever installed a
launcher.
The system wallpaper is now a third background choice beside black and white. The window stays transparent, the veil preserves contrast, and the photo shows through the tile plates themselves; new installs start here while existing installs keep their old black background.
A launcher that paints a solid rectangle over your entire screen takes away
the wallpaper you picked before it ever showed up. Installing sqTile read as
*losing* something. The window was already flagged to draw behind the system
bars — that groundwork existed already — so the whole feature was mostly
about no longer painting over it: the window background goes transparent
unconditionally now, because it is decided the moment the window is created,
before the setting has even loaded from disk.
The existing black-or-white toggle keeps every bit of its old job. Over a
wallpaper it stops meaning "which flat colour" and starts meaning "which
colour to veil the photo with" — which is exactly the value the contrast math
elsewhere in the app already reads, so nothing downstream had to change to
make it work.
Text, icons and badges stay fully opaque no matter how far you push the
transparency slider, because a launcher you can't actually read at the
extreme end of a setting isn't a real setting — it's a decoration. The veil
is free. Letting the wallpaper show *through* the tiles themselves is Pro.
New installs get the wallpaper on by default now. Existing installs keep
their black background, on purpose, through a settings migration rather than
a changed default — because a changed default would have repainted
everyone's home screen in an update nobody asked for. The migration caught
one real bug the night before release: restoring an *older* backup was
quietly turning wallpaper back on anyway, because the backup file's missing
field decoded to today's default instead of the old one. Fixed by bumping
the backup format version and gating on it explicitly, so an old backup
restores exactly as flat as it was saved.
## Drag a slider, watch it happen live
**What ships.** Hold down a slider in appearance settings and the settings
screen fades away, showing the real desktop underneath while the slider
redraws itself at the bottom, still under your finger.
Seven continuous appearance sliders preview against the live desktop while the settings screen fades away. Chips still commit instantly; the live preview exists because settings and the desktop share one container, not because the app navigates to a second screen.
Adjusting how strong the veil should be, or how see-through a tile is, used
to mean: close settings, look, reopen, nudge, repeat. That is a bad way to
tune anything you're trying to *feel* rather than pick from a list. The
feature works because the desktop was already composed underneath the
settings screen the whole time — the screen was only ever painting over it —
so the entire thing is transparency plus somewhere to redraw the slider. That
is also its one hard requirement: it only works because both screens share a
single container. Moving settings to its own destination in navigation would
kill it outright.
Worth being honest about: the first version of this quietly did nothing at
all, and no test caught it. Whether a slider was currently held was read as a
value captured inside a coroutine's closure, so it worked exactly once, at
the moment the effect first launched, and then never again for the rest of
the session — invisible in every test, because the seam being tested was
correct the whole time. Only running it on an actual phone showed the
preview never firing.
## The grid, finished
If you read [the last post](https://www.gradomski.dev/posts/icon-packs-and-a-grid-that-behaves.html),
1.4.3 fixed how a *drop* resolves. This one replaces the model underneath it:
one invariant, one owner, instead of four code paths that each quietly
disagreed with the others about what a legal position even was.
Holding a row handle outlines the complete band before the drag starts, so the affected tiles are visible in advance. The new Align chip then repairs vertical drift without reshuffling positions you deliberately placed.
The smallest tile is genuinely 1×1 now — no position is privileged over any
other, which is what was quietly warping rows every time a small tile showed
up next to something bigger. A held row handle now outlines the whole band
of tiles it's about to move, before the first drag, instead of after. A
dragged tile draws on top of whatever it's aiming for now — there wasn't a
single `zIndex` anywhere in the file before, so a tile dragged up from the
bottom of the screen always drew underneath the thing you were trying to hit.
A new **Align** chip in edit mode tidies a desktop that has drifted —
vertically only, nothing you deliberately placed gets reshuffled — and it's
undoable like everything else in edit mode. And the size picker grows a pair
of `−`/`+` buttons that trim a tile narrower one unit at a time, instead of
only offering a fixed ladder of shapes.
## "How do I switch the weather to Fahrenheit?"
That question arrived by email from someone in the US. There wasn't an
answer — the launcher had printed Celsius everywhere since its very first
version, without ever asking. Not a missing option so much as a feature that
didn't work for a chunk of the world.
Now there's a chip in settings with two choices, defaulting to whatever unit
the phone's own country normally uses — not GPS, not IP, just the locale
already set on the device — and a deliberate choice always overrides that
default. Conversion happens at render time off one canonical value stored in
Celsius, so switching costs a recompose, not a network round trip, and it
still works with no signal at all.
Worth saying plainly: everyone with an existing install in a US locale will
jump from °C to °F on update, without being asked first. That's the intended
fix, not a side effect — but it's still a behaviour change for someone who
never touched the setting.
## Also in 1.4.4
- Dock background can be set to **auto / visible / hidden** — auto hides the
bar over a wallpaper and shows it over a flat colour, since over a flat
colour it was always painting the exact shade sitting behind it anyway.
- 364 unit tests now, up from 269 two releases ago.
## What's next
Next up is 1.4.5, and it's deliberately boring on purpose: a
Compose/AGP/Kotlin version bump, no features, the kind of release that
doesn't get its own post. After that, 1.5.0 opens features back up again,
starting with locking the app behind a PIN.
*Correction, 21 August: it did not stay boring. A 12/24-hour clock setting went
in on top of the toolchain bump, so 1.4.5 got
[its own post](https://www.gradomski.dev/posts/the-clock-stops-guessing.html)
after all.*
---
sqTile is on [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.gradomski.sqtilelauncher),
in English, Polish, German, Italian and Ukrainian. Free, with a single one-time Pro
unlock and no subscription. No ads, no analytics SDK, no account.
