Rain on a Mac desktop: what's built in, and what's an app

macOS offers no rain effect: Wallpaper settings hold pictures, colors and aerials that only animate as you lock or unlock your Mac. For rain that keeps falling, loop a free rain clip with a live-wallpaper app, try a weather-driven app, or use a generated scene such as Mac+ Rain.

macOS has no rain effect: its wallpaper categories hold photos, colors and aerials that animate only as you lock or unlock your Mac, and its screen saver shows slow-motion versions of the same images — no falling rain anywhere in either list. Every “rain live wallpaper” you've seen on a Mac is really doing one of three things: drawing raindrops on glass over a photo, playing a scene that's supposed to match today's forecast, or animating rain behind your icons, from a video loop or a rendered scene. This guide sorts the three, gives the free route for each, and shows where a generated scene such as Mac+ Rain fits — limits stated plainly.

Updated 2026-09-24 · 9 min read

Why macOS can't make it rain on your desktop

Open System Settings, click Wallpaper, and every category on offer is a picture, a color or an aerial — never a weather effect. Dynamic Wallpapers brighten and darken with the time of day; Your Photos lets you “choose a single photo, image file, or photo set”; the Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater and Earth aerials move only briefly: Apple's own description is that “these aerial images animate as you lock or unlock your Mac” — then they hold still while you work. Shuffle Aerials, Pictures, Colors and, in the macOS 27 guide, a “Mac” wallpaper of gradient pill shapes round out the list. Nothing here loops a video you supply, and nothing reacts to the sky outside your window.

The Screen Saver pane doesn't add rain either: it shows the same aerials as slow-motion clips (“these slow-motion images show dramatic views”), plus Shuffle Aerials and a set built from your own photos. By default, whichever aerial you pick as wallpaper is also used as your screen saver — one setting, two places it shows up, and rain in neither.

Three kinds of “rain wallpaper” — and three different tools

Typing “rain wallpaper” into a search box hides three different requests, and no single app answers all three:

• Rain on the glass — raindrops sliding down a pane with a photo behind them, rendered by a screen-saver-style app.
• Rain falling behind your icons — a continuous animated scene, either a looping clip you supply or a rendered scene like Mac+'s Rain.
• Rain that follows the real weather — a scene meant to switch to rain when your forecast does.

For that third one, the app to look at is Living Weather & Wallpapers HD (Voros Innovation), free with in-app purchases, requiring macOS 10.15 or later, at version 5.6.0. Its own listing says it turns your desktop into an animated wallpaper scene matching the conditions, with scenes that follow the current weather or today's and tomorrow's forecast, and that it can double as a screen saver too. That's the vendor's own description, not a guarantee that rain appears the instant it starts outside — “matching the conditions” is as specific as the listing gets. If weather-syncing is genuinely what you're after, this is the only app here that attempts it; for the wider picture on animated wallpapers beyond rain specifically, see our live wallpaper guide for Mac.

A rain screen saver on a Mac — and why “digital rain” is something else

Apple doesn't publish a rain screen saver, but a small open-source project does. Rainy Day describes itself as “a meditative macOS rain-on-glass screensaver” where “real-looking raindrops slip down a glass pane, refracting the photograph behind them.” It needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later, ships as a universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel, and is signed and notarized. Unusually, it installs as a regular app rather than a .saver bundle: it auto-launches at login and brings up the fullscreen rain effect on every display once you've been idle, and a Wallpaper toggle in its own settings can render that same rain as your desktop background instead of only a screen saver.

Keep your expectations realistic, though. Rainy Day is released under the Unlicense (public domain) and free to use, but version 1.1.25 only shipped on 23 September 2026, and the project had zero stars on GitHub the next day — a brand-new, small project, not a proven or widely reviewed one. Nothing here has been measured for its effect on battery life.

Separately: if the picture in your head is green code raining down a black screen, that's not weather — it's “digital rain,” the effect from The Matrix. A few small open-source screen savers on GitHub recreate exactly that. Worth knowing the difference so you search for the right thing; it isn't a reason to pick one over the rain effects above.

Turn your own rain clip into a live wallpaper: free sources and their licenses

If you have a specific look in mind — heavier rain, calmer rain, closer to a window — three libraries license rain footage for free. Pexels's license states plainly that “all photos and videos on Pexels are free to use” and that “attribution is not required,” and that you “can modify the photos and videos.” Pixabay's content license summary lets you “use Content for free” and “without having to attribute the author,” and to “modify or adapt Content into new works.” Coverr's license covers “commercial and non-commercial purposes at no cost,” also with no attribution required. What all three forbid, in their own way, is reselling or redistributing the file itself — Pexels specifically rules out uploading its clips “on other stock photo or wallpaper platforms.” Using the clip as your own wallpaper is exactly what the license is for; re-publishing the file elsewhere isn't.

Downloading the clip is only half the job, since macOS still won't play it as wallpaper on its own. Aerial, the free, open-source screen saver (MIT license), added a “bring your own videos” feature: drop a .mov or .mp4 file into a folder and Aerial picks it up, with a native wallpaper mode still labeled Beta — it needs macOS 26 or later. The full walkthrough, Mac+'s own video-background option included, is in our guide to setting a video as wallpaper on a Mac.

The Mac+ Rain scene: a GPU-rendered downpour behind your icons

Mac+'s Rain scene — subtitled “A fluid downpour” — is the third route, and it's neither a video file nor rain on glass: it's a GPU-rendered animation. What's actually on screen is long, light rain streaks falling steadily over a dark grey desktop, with a month calendar widget, a year-progress card and your usual icons still sitting on top, fully reachable. It's one of 15 animated scenes in the app, rendered at up to 120 FPS with adjustable resolution, entirely locally — no account, no ads, no telemetry.

Like every Mac+ scene, it pauses the moment it isn't needed: when the screen sleeps, or when a window or a full-screen app covers the desktop — for what's actually been measured about animated wallpapers and battery life, see our guide on whether animated wallpapers drain a MacBook's battery. Mac+ supports multiple displays, enabled screen by screen; each scene takes a palette from a set of 44 (8 in the free tier, plus a color creator in Pro); and the app runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple Silicon and Intel, from the menu bar. The free download includes 6 of the 15 scenes — the site doesn't say which six — 8 palettes, an image background, 6 folder icons, 2 widgets and multi-display; unlocking all 15 scenes, your own video as the background and the rest of Pro is €9.99 once, for life, or €1.99 a month with a 7-day trial.

What it doesn't do matters just as much: no sound, no drops-on-glass effect, no sync with the real forecast, and it doesn't run as a screen saver or on the Lock Screen. If steady rain behind your icons, with nothing to download or manage, is genuinely the goal, this is the closest native-feeling route.

Which rain option should you pick?

Line them up side by side and the choice usually makes itself:

If you only wanted to confirm macOS can't do this on its own, the first row is your answer. Want drops on glass while you're away from the desk? Rainy Day is free. Want the scene to actually track the forecast? Living Weather is the only one here that tries. For constant rain behind your icons with nothing to install beyond the app itself, Mac+'s Rain scene or your own clip through Aerial are the two most native-feeling options — and if a rain-specific look isn't essential, our roundup of free animated wallpapers for Mac covers the wider field.

Get rain moving on your Mac desktop

1. Check what's native first: open System Settings, click Wallpaper, and look through Dynamic Wallpapers, the aerials and Colors — there's no weather effect, and the aerials only animate as you lock or unlock the Mac.
2. Download a looping rain clip from Pexels, Pixabay or Coverr. Read the license: using it as your own wallpaper is fine, re-uploading the file to another site usually isn't.
3. Play the clip with a live-wallpaper app: Aerial (free, macOS 26 or later, wallpaper mode labeled Beta) or Mac+ (video background is a Pro feature).
4. Or skip the file entirely: open Mac+ from the menu bar and pick the Rain scene and a palette.
5. Want rain only while you're away from the Mac? Rainy Day (macOS 14 or later) behaves like a screen saver, with an optional toggle to render the same rain as your wallpaper instead.

macOS 13 Ventura or later. Apple Silicon and Intel. Free download; Pro €9.99 once or €1.99/month, checked 24 September 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

Sources

• Apple Support — Customize the wallpaper on your Mac
• Apple Support — Use a screen saver on your Mac
• Rainy Day — official GitHub README (v1.1.25; checked 24 September 2026)
• Living Weather & Wallpapers HD on the App Store (Voros Innovation, v5.6.0; checked 24 September 2026)
• Aerial — official site (bring-your-own-video wallpaper mode; checked 24 September 2026)
• Pexels — License (checked 24 September 2026)
• Pixabay — Content License Summary (checked 24 September 2026)
• Coverr — License (checked 24 September 2026)

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