Stunning galaxies, beautiful live fish ponds, abstract shapes and patterns, “green rain” from The Matrix, self-playing 2D platformers with random level generation, etc. are just a mere fraction of the thousands of interesting “live wallpapers” available on Android. As someone who jumped ship from a Galaxy S II to an iPhone 4S a few months ago, it’s one of the many small little things I sometimes miss on iOS.

Springboard tweaks like Go Desk do bring similar functionality, but they are quite limited and not nearly as fun or as aesthetically pleasing as some of the live wallpapers we talked about in our post on the Top Free and Most Beautiful Android Live Wallpapers.

Now, we’ve come across a new alternative. Named LivePapers, the tweak runs OpenGL ES-based live wallpapers that look gorgeous and, at least according to the developer, takes minimal resources to ensure smooth performance without making a significant dent on your battery life.

After installing LivePapers, an app icon is added to your Springboard from which you can choose between the three currently available live wallpapers. There’s the built-in Bubbles live wallpaper that, you guessed it, has different-sized bubbles floating around your home or lock screen in a style similar to the live wallpaper that was released with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

And then there are the two paid-only, highly customizable $0.99 options: Bubbles Pro and Nexus (inspired by the live wallpaper of the same name on Android). Though certainly better than Go Desk, the current collection of available live wallpapers is quite slim. We’re hoping things will improve in the future.

In our testing, LivePapers lived up to its claim of offering buttery smooth animations and performance. It did not suffer from any choppiness whatsoever even on an aging iPod touch (fourth generation) on iOS 6.1. However, we did notice one small issue where the bubbles would stop waltzing around after thirty seconds or so. Animations can be easily resumed with a swipe of the finger.

You will of course need to be jailbroken to be able to install this tweak, so be sure to follow our guide on how to jailbreak iOS 6, 6.1 untethered.

LivePapers is compatible with all iOS devices – including the iPad – running iOS 5.1 through 6.1.2, and is available for the awesome price of $0 under the BigBoss repo in Cydia.