Photo crashes Android smartphones when set as wallpaper

There appears to be a photo in circulation that, when set as wallpaper on an Android smartphone, causes the software to crash. Those issues persist after a reboot forcing users to reset their smartphones.

The image has been circulating since this weekend, and appears to cause problems with Samsung smartphones, among other things, 9To5Google reports. The website then tested the image with a Pixel 2, and was able to reproduce the Android software crash.

If you set the image in question as a background, you will then see a screen that keeps going on and off. When the screen is switched on, the lock screen is briefly visible, but the user cannot operate the device further. It turns out that restarting the smartphone doesn’t work, so in some cases it is necessary to do a factory reset via the bootloader. Incidentally, removing the relevant image from the smartphone also seems to be a solution.

It is not entirely clear what is causing the problem. One theory is about the color space used; after adjusting the colors, the image in question no longer seems to cause problems. The image is made with the rgb color space, while Android prefers srgb; this seems to be a problem on Android 10, but Android 11, of which a beta should be released soon, can handle it again. Google has not yet responded to the incident, so the background of the problem has not yet been fully clarified.