Why ColorWander exists
By Zhenghao Chen ·
On 9 May 2026, ColorWander went on the App Store. The wish behind it was a small one: to record a day, and to look at the world, by color.
That February I had shipped a plugin called 拾刻 · 文学时钟, a literary clock. Friends who used it said the same thing: this should be an app. ColorWander is that idea, carried into the camera roll. A photo already knows its colors, its place and its hour. The app lays them out.
What it does now
The first public note said about fourteen layouts and about two thousand lines of literature. Both numbers are out of date. At version 1.5.0 there are 28 layouts. Literary mode holds 1,478 Chinese passages from 438 authors, a Traditional Chinese edition of the same 1,478, and 2,888 English passages from 135 authors. A line is chosen to fit the hour the photo was taken.
Two layouts stay free: Color top and Editorial poster. Twelve more are marked limited-time free, and the app names no end date. The other fourteen are Pro. You can preview every layout. A Pro layout shows a watermark until you have Pro, and exporting it asks for Pro. Color can be a solid, a gradient, or a blurred copy of the photo. Heritage palette is in the limited-time set when its band sits at the bottom, and Pro when the band sits at the top, left or right.
What stayed the same
- The photo is processed on the device. There is no account. Turning a coordinate into a place name is the exception.
- It runs on iPhone and iPad, on iOS 16 or later.
- All 39 fonts are free. So are Live Photo export, every ratio, the gallery, blur, grain and opacity.
- A 7-day free trial, when the App Store shows one, is on the yearly plan.
The layouts
Ticket, receipt, postcard, travel tag, calendar, Polaroid, film, stamp, perler beads and text wallpaper are different ways to keep the same photo. See all 28 layouts.
