When Steve Jobs unveiled the very first iPhone in 2007, it featured a clownfish wallpaper throughout the keynote, a wallpaper that never actually appeared on any iPhone. Now, 15 years later, it has finally arrived in the latest iOS 16 beta. If you don’t want to run the beta software, you can still download wallpapers for whatever version of iOS you’re using.
Twitter user Jack Roberts first saw the new clownfish wallpapers in the lock screen gallery that you now use in iOS 16 to create custom lock screens with different wallpapers, widgets and more. However, not everyone who installed the third iOS 16 beta saw the clownfish in the lock screen gallery, and that’s because it’s exclusive to iPhone 13 models right now.
You can find the wallpapers in one of the iPhone 13 models for image recovery on the Apple Developer site, but they are separated into different HEIC files to create a dynamic wallpaper effect when you unlock your iPhone or open the Notification Center. However, there’s no way to add these files to your iPhone to recreate the dynamic effect, so you’ll have to settle for a still image. (You can still download the HEIC file group if you like.)
You can save the wallpaper shown below or download it in higher quality HEIC, PNG or JPG format. Along with the image below, this is how the wallpaper first looked on the original iPhone during Macworld’s 2007 San Francisco show (you can see it in the linked video, starting at about the 40th minute).
Although the clownfish wallpaper has never appeared on any iPhone model until now, it has long since appeared in Mac OS X as a desktop wallpaper. You can download a JPG copy of it if you want to move the fish to a different location on your iPhone lock screen or use the larger iPad version.