With the rise of easy internet access and internet-enabled phones in the late 2000s/early 2010s came everyone’s obsession with personalizing their phones with downloadable wallpapers, ringtones, themes, etc from websites that were, in hindsight, sketchy as AF.

These are 5 of those websites below:

1) Waptrick

This was the most popular at the time. It had low-quality songs, pixelated-as-hell wallpapers, stretched-out themes, unrecognizable monophonic ringtones of popular songs, and PDF ebooks that I believe were created to destroy people’s eyesight.

2) Wapkid

I initially thought this was a kid-friendly version of Waptrick but I was wrong. They were pretty much the exact same website with different names. I guess you can’t fault someone for stealing your idea in the world of illegal downloads.

3) Toxic Wap

Let me just say now that this website lived up to its name. You would visit it to download whatever and immediately get attacked with graphic porn GIFS. Navigating this website with people being able to see your screen of your device was truly an extreme sport.

4) Zedge

This was the first of these websites I found that had high-quality stuff. Their wallpapers and themes were on point and I stanned them until I moved on from Java phones.

5) iM1

I saw this cover art so much that I thought iM1 was a big company who paid Ashanti and Cassie for. Turns out they were just beemp3 with a slicker-looking logo, and they got shut for copyright violations.

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