Wallpaper Engine 2.8.42 - Removal of Application Wallpapers from the Workshop

this update introduces a security change to Wallpaper Engine. In the next week, we will be permanently removing the "Application" wallpaper type from the public Steam Workshop. While this sounds drastic, it affects merely 0.5% of all wallpapers with actual user numbers being much lower than even that. The overwhelming majority of users never used any applications wallpapers at all, since they are hidden by default in the app.

As part of this transition, we are currently cleaning up the Workshop. Most application wallpapers will start to be set to friends-only for the transition period. If there are any Application-type wallpapers you actively use and want to keep, you have a grace period of around one week to back them up locally.

Why did Application Wallpapers exist in the first place?

We got this question a lot, so we want to answer this quickly. The "Application" wallpaper type is a legacy feature from the very earliest days of Wallpaper Engine's development.

Back then, our thought process was heavily inspired by the "sideloading" concept on platforms like Android. We wanted to give power-users maximum freedom to create truly custom solutions. The idea was that as long as we provided unskippable warnings and hid these wallpapers from default searches, users who understood and accepted the risks could run custom executables (.exe files) as their background. Looking back, the assumptions we made back then were well intended but quite naive.

Wallpaper Engine has since then evolved into a fully-fledged, highly capable rendering engine. Today, you can achieve almost anything you want to create within Wallpaper Engine itself that was previously only possible with external app wallpapers. App wallpapers are simply not necessary anymore and offer too many downsides and risks for very little benefit.

Why are we removing them now?

Application wallpapers are essentially just ordinary Windows apps that have full access to your computer. While that allows for some really cool creations, it also opens the door for people with bad intentions. The reality is that executable files cannot be reliably secured with automated systems. There will always be blind spots and ways for people to bypass them. As many of you know, we recently saw people trying to use this old feature to spread malware. At the end of the day, keeping a feature around that lets anyone easily share random .exe files on the Workshop is a risk we are no longer willing to take.

You might wonder why we do not just "freeze" the currently existing safe app wallpapers and leave them up. The simple answer is that the Steam Workshop does not have a feature to lock items from being updated. If we leave an item up, there is always a risk that the original creator gets their Steam account hacked down the line. If that happens, the hacker could easily push a malicious update to a previously safe and popular wallpaper. Even if Steam had advanced security measures like two-factor authentication for Workshop updates, complete removal is the only way to be sure a safe wallpaper does not suddenly turn into a harmful one in the future. We want to be clear that no such case has happened, it is simply a theoretical risk that we considered when making this decision.

The recent news regarding the malware outbreak actually impacted a very tiny number of people due to the safeguards we already had in place (app wallpapers were hidden by default, they required clicking through scary-looking warnings and it is an overall unpopular wallpaper type). Unfortunately, many media reports lacked this nuance, leaning into alarming headlines that misrepresented the scale of the issue. Once those headlines are out there, it becomes a losing battle for us to correct the record and calm things down. Even though the actual threat was highly contained, the panic it caused was very real, and we do not blame anyone for feeling anxious. We want everyone to feel completely safe using Wallpaper Engine, and keeping application wallpapers around is simply no longer compatible with that goal.

What this means for you

Starting with this new update, you will no longer be able to upload or download Application wallpapers to and from the Steam Workshop.

If you have an Application wallpaper you currently use, please back up the files on your PC within the next week, see this guide on how to do that:

• https://help.wallpaperengine.io/steam/backup.html

Of course, you can still continue to run custom app wallpapers locally on your own machine using the app, but public distribution through Steam is being sunsetted.

We apologize and hope that you understand.