The lock screen gets all the attention and the home screen is where you actually spend time. It is also the harder of the two to get right, because an app grid is a demanding thing to put a picture behind: twenty-odd bright icons, a row of labels under each, a dock, and a search field.
Aquarium imagery happens to be unusually good at this, for reasons worth understanding before you pick one.
Why the home screen is a different problem
On a lock screen, the wallpaper is most of what you see and the clock is the only thing over it. On a home screen the wallpaper is mostly hidden, and what remains has to work as a background rather than as an image.
Three specific things break it. Detail behind icon labels makes the labels hard to read. Bright areas under bright icons reduce the contrast that lets you find an app without looking. And any composition with a subject in it will have that subject covered by the grid, which usually means the picture no longer makes sense.
So the criteria invert. On the lock screen you want a subject. On the home screen you want a field.
Blur is not a compromise
The Home Screen panel under Customise offers Blur, and most people treat it as the lazy option. On this subject it is usually the correct one.
A blurred underwater scene becomes a blue-green gradient with soft variation in it, which is close to the ideal home screen background: enough colour to feel like a choice, no detail to fight the labels, and a dark enough value that icons stay legible.
It also keeps the two screens obviously related, since the blur is derived from the lock screen image. That is a coherence you cannot easily get by picking a second picture.
Dark and quiet beats interesting, every time
This is the single most common home screen mistake and it is worth saying plainly. People choose a home screen wallpaper the way they choose a lock screen wallpaper, by finding an image they like, and then spend months slightly unable to find their apps. The home screen is the interface you use most on the phone, and its background exists to make icons findable. An image you would describe as beautiful is usually the wrong choice. An image you would describe as nice enough, dark, with nothing going on in the middle, is right. If you want the beautiful one, put it on the lock screen where it has the whole frame.
If you want a second image rather than a blur
Sometimes a blur is not enough and you want an actual picture on both. Three things make an underwater scene work behind icons.
A dark top and bottom. The status bar sits at the top and the dock at the bottom, and both read better against dark.
Nothing in the middle third. That is where the icon grid is densest. Open water, a gradient, an empty stretch of blue.
One accent low in the frame. Below the last row of icons, above the dock, there is usually a visible strip. A single fish or a shaft of light there gives the screen its character without competing with anything.
Scenes shot looking down into open water tend to satisfy all three without being designed for it.
Icon layout does more than the picture
A point worth making because it costs nothing and most people never try it.
The home screen background only has to work where icons are not, and you control where icons are. Leaving the top row of a page empty gives the wallpaper a visible band at the top. Pushing everything to the lower half of the page leaves the upper half clear, which turns almost any image into a usable background.
The simplest version: put your apps in folders, keep one page with a short grid rather than a full one, and the wallpaper becomes visible without competing with anything. This is how the home screens that look designed are actually made, and it is a layout decision rather than an image decision.
The App Library makes this practical. Every app is reachable by swiping past your last page, so a home screen page does not need to hold everything any more. Most people are still arranging pages the way they did before it existed.
If you have been searching for a wallpaper that works behind a full grid of twenty-four icons, the faster fix is to stop having a full grid of twenty-four icons.
Widgets and the underwater palette
A home screen widget sits on the same background as the icons, and most widget designs use a translucent light or dark material that picks up the colour behind it.
A blue-green background makes those materials read as cool grey, which is neutral and unobtrusive. A warm or high-contrast background makes them read as tinted and slightly wrong. This is a small thing that accounts for a lot of the difference between a home screen that looks designed and one that looks assembled.
Quick answers
Can the home screen have a live wallpaper?
No. The home screen has never animated on iPhone, on any version. Live wallpaper is a lock screen feature only, and the home screen shows a still frame, a blur or a colour.
Does the home screen wallpaper affect battery?
On an OLED iPhone, yes, in the same way as any image: lit pixels cost power and black ones do not. The home screen is on for longer than the lock screen, so a dark background is worth slightly more here.
Why do my icon labels look fuzzy?
Almost always a detailed area behind them. iOS adds a subtle shadow to help, but it cannot rescue a label sitting on high-contrast texture. Blur it, or reposition the image.
Can I have a different background per home screen page?
No, the wallpaper applies across pages. What you can vary is which apps and widgets sit on each.
Where to get it
Aquarium 3D: Live Wallpapers previews every scene in a phone-shaped frame, which lets you see where the icon grid will fall before you save, and the open-water compositions are the ones to look for.
Blur it first and only reach for a second image if the blur genuinely bothers you. Most people find it does not.