Android users complain an image is crashing phones when used as wallpaper

Technology: Never mind a text character crashing your phone — if you’re on Android, your choice of wallpaper could be a larger problem. Users have discovered (via Android Authority and 9to5Google) that an innocuous landscape photo is “soft-bricking” some Android phones when it’s used as a background. Your phone isn’t completely dead if it happens, but it’ll get stuck in a loop that turn the lock screen on and off, even after a reboot. Your recourses are to either use safe mode to delete the photo file or use the bootloader to reset the device entirely.

I won't show everything, but basically, the function doColorManagement of the ColorManagementProxy is called at some point. This function checks if the Color Space of the image is supported by the device. The image is supported by default if its color space is SRGB, or... pic.twitter.com/1Ga8DBTEEY

— Dylan Roussel (@evowizz) May 31, 2020

The issue may come down to the color spaces your phone supports and how they’re handled. Dylan Roussel from 9to5 discovered that the source image uses the RGB color space instead of Android’s preferred sRGB, and Android 10 doesn’t convert it where the Android 11 preview does — that causes problems any time an incompatible phone has to display the picture, which is a problem if you’ve just set the photo as your wallpaper. Other images will likely lead to the same issue.

We’ve asked Google for comment. This is easy enough to avoid if you’re aware of it. It could be a serious problem if pranksters trick unsuspecting people, however, especially if they don’t know how to recover. If nothing else, it’s a reminder to get wallpapers only from sources you trust.