This wallpaper image could cause your phone to crash

Several Android users said their devices won't power on or function after the image was downloaded as a wallpaper.

Android phone users, especially Samsung devices, have reported that a certain "faulty" wallpaper image is causing their smartphones to crash. The wallpaper is an image of a lush shoreline with mountains in the background and a pink horizon.

Samsung, Google, OnePlus, Nokia and Xiaomi device users reported their phones crashing due to a wallpaper image. This was highlighted by a popular Twitter tech account, Ice Universe, which warned people against using the faulty wallpaper, CNET quoted a report from Android Authority.

When I tried to upload the original image (left) to Weibo, I found that its color to change (right). At this time, the image became harmless, but when uploaded to twitter, the original image still does not change color, still harmful. So I suspect it may be related to color gamut pic.twitter.com/0A1PlUqlpv
- Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020

The warning tweet on Sunday read: 'Never set this picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users! It will cause your phone to crash! Don't try it! If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it'.

Sadly, if you have downloaded the faulty wallpaper, at present there is no way to undo the damage caused by the image. However, Google is said to be aware of this issue and may likely come up with a problem solving firmware update.

What 'faulty' wallpaper does?

Several Android users said their devices won't power on or function after the image was downloaded as a wallpaper, reported The Sun. The wallpaper is said to activate a bug in the Android software that results in a phone being 'soft-bricked'.

'Soft-bricked' means the device may appear to be working but it keeps crashing. Moreover, the bug appears to affect phones running Android 10 software.

Explaining to tech site Android Authority, a developer said that bugs like this cause the Android system to fail to process the colour space of the image, hence it keeps trying to process it and the phone crashes.