A flame is not a picture.
It is a set of numbers.

The iPhone and iPad app is free, with nothing to buy inside it. It runs the same flame engine as the Mac and the same way of making: presets, archetypes, New Flame, Chaos, Mutate and living color, down to a gradient you can edit stop by stop. All 409 variations are there, so a flame made in the Mac's Advanced Flame Editor opens on the phone too. Saving a flame and keeping an archetype are included, where on the Mac those are part of Pro. It stands on its own as a studio you carry, and it is the natural companion to the desktop app: what you grow on the sofa becomes the wallpaper on your desk.

Save a flame as a Live Photo and it blooms once each time you wake the screen, then settles back. That is a real screen recording, not a mockup: Threefold Diamond-Polar Trio, one of the eighteen on this page, grown on a phone and set as a lock screen.

Anything you grow travels. With both apps open, Handoff carries the flame you are making on the phone straight into the Flame Creator on your Mac.

Made for iPhone Duo. Hold it partially folded like a book and your flames turn like pages, the live flame on the left and the next ones waiting on the right. Stand it up and the flame sits above the fold with the controls below, and left on the charger it turns into a desk clock with your flames slowly morphing above the time. Unfold it all the way and the Library plays any flame you tap right beside the list.

A flame wallpaper costs about 3 percent of one processor core, per display. Read off Activity Monitor on a Release build with the settings window closed: 3.2 percent driving one screen, 6.7 percent driving two. It scales with the number of displays you light up, not with how long you leave it running.

When the desktop is fully covered by windows, rendering halts completely. Not slowed, stopped: every sample read zero, and memory falls with it. It picks up again the moment the desktop is visible. An app that keeps a video decoding behind your windows cannot do that. There is more control than that under Battery Saving: how covered the desktop has to be before a wallpaper stops, easing off after five minutes away from the keyboard, and capping the frame rate on battery.

A flame at rest is digital art, not a frozen frame. When one stops for Power Saver, or because an app you marked quiet is in front, Atheria draws it again as a high definition render, at your display's own resolution. The filaments hold together where a scaled-up animation frame goes soft, and it is the same picture your lock screen and your Share Cards use.

You can stop there on purpose. Sync that picture to your desktop, clear the live wallpaper, and you keep the flame at full resolution with nothing running at all. A still flame is not the consolation prize. It is the same art with the motion taken out, and on a large display it is the sharpest Atheria ever looks.

Everything above is what makes a flame interesting. None of it is why anyone leaves one running. A flame never loops, so there is no moment where it starts over and reminds you it is a file, and it moves slowly enough that you are never quite watching it.

That turns out to matter more than the mathematics does. It is calm, and it stays calm all day, which is not what you would expect from something built out of a chaos game.

These eighteen were all made in Atheria's Flame Creator, which generates new genomes from scratch, mutates the one you are looking at, sets the palette and camera, and applies the result to your desktop as a live wallpaper.

Paste it into Atheria's Flame Creator and it grows on your Mac, at your display's own resolution. Copying and pasting codes is free, and so is the Flame Creator itself. Atheria Pro is what keeps the flame on your desktop. More on share codes

macOS 15 Sequoia or later, Apple Silicon and Intel. In English, German and Japanese.

The same engine renders these at print resolution too. There is a gallery of them on metal at Displate.

The longer FAQ, with the technical detail.