Your desktop comes alive.
And knows when to disappear.

Atheria is a native macOS app that replaces your static desktop wallpaper with living art: real-time Metal shaders and looping video wallpapers. It is built in Swift for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Atheria is built around battery efficiency. Its Occlusion Monitor watches your windows and drops the wallpaper to 0 fps the moment the desktop is fully covered, so it does no rendering work you cannot see. Measured with Activity Monitor: a flat 0.0% CPU whenever the desktop is covered. While animating, the cost depends on which wallpaper you choose.

Atheria is free to download, with an optional one-time Atheria Pro purchase that unlocks the full shader library, keeping the flames you make, a different wallpaper on each display, smart triggers, and the advanced video editor. The Flame Creator is included in the free tier: build a flame from a preset, an archetype or a Chaos roll and watch it live on your desktop while you shape it, and copying and pasting flame codes is free in both directions, and so are share cards and clips of your flame. Your wallpaper runs on every display for free, the Peach Web flame is included, and any Pro wallpaper previews live for three minutes. There is no subscription and no account. Pro is a one-time $9.99 purchase.

There is a separate free app, Atheria: Generative Art, for iPhone and iPad. It grows the same fractal flames and includes a Metal playground for writing shaders on the phone. It does not set wallpapers: iOS does not let a third-party app do that, which is why the wallpaper engine is a Mac app. Creations move between them as short text codes, and with both apps open Handoff carries what you are making into the matching Creator on the Mac.

Atheria runs on macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Yes. You can import your own video wallpapers and edit them inside Atheria: trim loops, rotate, create forward-and-reverse boomerang loops, and re-encode to efficient HEVC. H.264, HEVC, and ProRes are supported.

Privacy Guard frosts your entire screen after a short idle timeout, or instantly with a hotkey, so a glance over your shoulder shows nothing. It clears the moment you return, with no lock screen or password prompt.

No. Atheria collects no personal data, has no accounts, and runs entirely on your Mac. Smart library tagging uses Apple's on-device Vision framework, so nothing is uploaded. See our Privacy Policy.

No. There is no account, login, or registration for anything, including sharing: your creations travel as short text codes you can send in any chat, and a friend pastes the code into Atheria to bring them to life. Nothing is uploaded and no cloud login is required.

Yes. Lock Screen Sync captures your live wallpaper and keeps your Lock Screen matched to your desktop, so unlocking feels seamless. The Lock Screen image is a still, which means it costs zero battery while your Mac is locked.

The method is called the chaos game. It is far simpler than the results suggest.

Start anywhere. Drop a point at random. Where it starts does not matter, which is the first surprising thing about this.

Pick a transform. Choose one of the genome's transforms at random, weighted, and apply it. Each moves and warps the point its own way.

Record the landing. Add a hit, and a colour, to that pixel. Then go back to the previous step. The point wanders, but never uniformly.

Do it billions of times. Structure appears out of where the point prefers to be. Bright regions are simply where it went most often. Because the picture is built from density rather than drawn, it has no edges to go soft and no resolution of its own. That is why a flame can be regenerated at any size, and why two flames with almost identical numbers can look nothing alike.

It is also why the grain never gets smoothed away. Atheria deliberately applies no blur to a flame: every version traded the fine per-pixel grain for coarser blotches, and that grain is the medium's character.

More than there are atoms in the observable universe. Not a figure of speech.

Take a six-transform genome, mid-range for the ones on the flames page. It carries thirty-six affine coefficients before you touch a single variation weight or a colour, and nudging any one of them changes the picture. Count only the settings that would look meaningfully different, count them stingily, and that one genome shape still reaches roughly 10¹¹⁹ distinct flames. The observable universe holds something like 10⁸⁰ atoms.

Every assumption there is deliberately mean. Six transforms is mid-range rather than the ceiling, only three of the twelve variation slots are counted, and the palette anchors are counted at half their real precision. The flames on that page are samples, not a catalogue.

A flame you like becomes a share code. Because the whole thing is described by numbers, that short block of text is the flame, complete. Send it to someone and they get the identical result rendered at their own display's resolution, not a compressed copy of your screenshot. It is the one kind of wallpaper that survives being shared.

Copy it, open Atheria's Flame Creator, and press Paste Code. It will be generated on your Mac at your display's own resolution, so it arrives sharp rather than as a scaled copy of a picture.

A flame is real GPU work, and Atheria does not pretend otherwise. What it does instead is stop. When the desktop is fully covered by windows, rendering halts completely and picks up again when the desktop becomes visible. You can watch that happen in Activity Monitor.

Under Battery Saving there is more control than that: choose how hidden the desktop has to be before wallpapers stop, slow flames down when most of the desktop is covered, ease them off after five minutes away from the keyboard, cap the frame rate on battery, or pause entirely on low battery and in Low Power Mode.

The same engine, in your hand. Start from a preset, conjure a random one, or roll Chaos to invent a species named after its own anatomy, then tap Mutate and follow it wherever it leads. Four colours run through every flame and take the new palette live as you pick them.

Anything you grow travels. Share it as a card image, or as the same short text code the flames page uses, which another Atheria user can paste to grow the identical flame.