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The Kwiq Pet

A companion that walks around your Live Wallpaper, Daydream and the web Dashboard, reacts to notifications and MCP activity, and is compatible with the OpenPets community pet format.

Table of Contents
  1. Where the Pet Appears
  2. Gestures
  3. Reactions
  4. Reactions to MCP
  5. OpenPets Compatibility
  6. Settings

1 Where the Pet Appears

The pet can walk on three Kwiq surfaces, enabled independently in Settings > Pet. Left alone, it wanders freely around the screen — sideways, up and down, and diagonally — pausing for a random interval between walks so it never feels repetitive.

Live Wallpaper

The pet walks across the home screen, behind the icons, exactly the way the Live Wallpaper already works today.

Daydream (Screensaver)

The pet also appears in the native Android daydream, with a special touch: tapping anywhere outside it still dismisses the daydream, but tapping the pet interacts with it instead.

Web Dashboard

Optionally, the same pet can also walk around the self-hosted Dashboard page, accessed from the browser.

2 Gestures

  • Single tap on the pet: it waves.
  • Tap an empty spot: the pet walks over to where you tapped, whatever else is on screen there — works anywhere on the Live Wallpaper, Daydream, and web Dashboard.
  • Drag: press and drag the pet to move it around, animating toward the side you are dragging; when released, it resumes walking on its own from where it was left.
  • Pinch: use two fingers on the pet to make it bigger or smaller. The chosen size is remembered between sessions.
  • Press and hold (without dragging): opens the AI assistant configured on the device (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc.).
  • Double-tap on the Daydream: dismisses the daydream when the pet is active on that surface — the default behavior (any tap dismisses it) is kept when the pet is disabled.
Tip when the pet is not active on any surface, the Live Wallpaper and Daydream behave exactly as before — nothing changes for anyone who prefers to leave it off.

3 Reactions

The pet reacts to system events with speech bubbles and animations, like a living notification:

  • Notifications: when a notification arrives (with notification access granted to Kwiq), the pet waves and shows a bubble with the app, title, and a summarized text.
  • Battery below 15%: the pet plays a "failing" animation until the battery rises above that level or the charger is connected.
  • Search open (Desktop Mode): while the launcher search panel is open over the wallpaper, the pet switches to a "thinking" animation.
  • Music playing: while any app is playing audio, the pet jumps for joy in rhythm.

Speech bubbles resize to fit the text — longer notifications get a wider bubble with more lines instead of being cut off.

4 Reactions to MCP

When an AI agent uses Kwiq’s embedded MCP server to run a task on your device, the pet visually shows what is happening:

Reading

Read/query tools (listing files, reading notes, searching messages...) make the pet "run" while the call is in progress.

Writing

Tools that create, change, or delete something (writing a file, marking a message as read, changing a setting...) make the pet "think".

Execution/Network

Heavier tools, with network access or a larger side effect (sending email/SMS, downloading a wallpaper, recording the screen...) leave the pet "waiting".

Success or Error

When it finishes, the pet jumps for joy if the call succeeded, or shows a failure animation if it errored — and the result appears summarized in the speech bubble.

5 OpenPets Compatibility

  • Kwiq’s pet uses the same file format as the open-source OpenPets project: a folder with a pet.json (id, name, and description) and a spritesheet.webp or .png image organized in a fixed 8-column by 9-row grid (192x208 pixels per frame), one row per animation (idle, walking, waving, jumping, failing, waiting, working, and thinking).
  • This means any pet made for the OpenPets format works in Kwiq without conversion — just import the pet’s .zip from the Settings screen.
  • Kwiq’s default pet is called Kiwi: a purple design inspired directly by the app icon, with the same Material You palette and the seed pattern seen at the center of the icon.
  • On the device, installed pets are stored in Kwiq/Pets/{id}/ in storage — the same folder organization already used by the Live Wallpaper in Kwiq/Wallpapers/ — so it is also possible to copy a pet folder manually through the file manager.

6 Settings

In Settings > Pet you can:

  • Turn the pet on or off overall, and independently per surface (wallpaper, daydream, dashboard).
  • Adjust how fast it walks and how long speech bubbles stay on screen.
  • Browse the gallery of installed pets, choose which one is active, remove a pet, or import a new .zip.
  • Export a pet as a .zip file to share it with other people or back it up — tap the download icon next to any pet in the gallery.