October's 5 Most-Loved Phone Wallpapers (2026)

Every month we look back at the wallpapers Morrow users kept closest. This list is ranked by how much each piece was loved during October 2026, counting saves, sets as a lock screen and favourites together. The order below is that ranking, from first to fifth.

A thread runs through the picks. Four of the five arrived in the last days of October, and most of them dwell on thresholds: the turn toward November, the night of October 31st, the last ferry home, the moment a seed drifts off into dormancy. The palettes lean dark and quiet, with one warm note doing a lot of work. The exception to both the timing and the darkness tells its own story, and we will get to it.

1. The Orbit Written in One Breath

The month's most-loved wallpaper is a space odyssey with almost nothing in it: an ivory sheet of paper standing in for infinite space, and a small figure at the edge of a little moon, looking up. Before them hangs an ensō, the Zen circle painted in one breath and never corrected, its open gap read here as both a planetary ring and a doorway. Inside it sits a vermilion sun as exact as a Bauhaus diagram, and the pleasure of the piece is how the trembling brushstroke and the perfect circle sharpen each other.

It makes sense that this one rose to the top. On a lock screen, all that pale paper leaves the clock plenty of room, and the single red disc is easy to find at a glance.

2. Monarch Hour Banners

Released on October 31st, this piece takes the hand-cut tissue paper banners strung across doorways in a season of remembering and sets them in soft daylight rather than spooky shadow. Each pastel flag, in blush, mint, butter yellow and lilac, is cut to reveal crescent moons, sleeping cats, pumpkins and marigold rosettes, painted in mid-century gouache with the slight drift of screenprint registration.

Then come the monarchs, which arrive at their winter forests around this time each year and have long been greeted as returning visitors. A few slip free of the paper and float upward, carrying the idea that light passes through every hole we cut.

3. Last Ferry Under the Foil Moon

This is late October in its in-between hours, imagined as a matchbook from a harbour café that no longer exists, its cover pressed with a moon that still catches the light. The composition borrows from shin-hanga printmakers, with gradated water, a solitary figure and weather drawn as line, then passes it through a cyber-noir lens.

The moon is foiled rather than painted, so its reflection breaks into silver ribbons like chrome on a wet street. Against deep black and harbour blue, a single vermilion lantern is the only warm note, a small point of welcome in the dark.

4. Monolith of the Barn Owl

Here is the exception. This owl first appeared on August 26, at the start of late-summer twilight, yet it found its way into October's most-loved list. It sets the quiet watchfulness of a barn owl inside the strict grid and spare typographic markers of modernist Swiss graphic design.

The image carries the soft haze and grain of aged instant film, so the feathers feel soft and organic while the layout stays mathematical. Near-black, warm umber and a muted gold make it a natural fit for lengthening autumn evenings, which may explain why people kept returning to it.

5. Sporefall in the Quiet Exosphere

As autumn turns toward dormancy, this study lifts a seed structure out of the soil and sets it drifting through airless space, holding potential life inside delicate, rib-cage-like membranes. It is drawn entirely in coloured pencil and burnished graphite, each stroke following the grain of heavy artist paper.

The background is a deep charcoal blue, and against it the hand-hatched filaments glow in mint and lavender. It is a patient, silent picture of a journey unbound by gravity, and a calm one to wake up to.

Looking ahead

October's favourites shared a taste for restraint: one warm light against a lot of quiet, whether that light was a red sun, a paper lantern or a glowing seed. A new wallpaper arrives in the app every morning, so November's list is already taking shape.

For everything that didn't make this list, browse the rest of the archive at /wallpapers.