So far, 2020 has been an exceptional year with disappointments followed by bigger disappointments, and it does not stop here. This weirdly magnificent picture of a beautiful landscape with an improperly coded color profile, and it can make the Android System UI to crash, when set as the wallpaper.
Twitter user named IceUniverse shared the picture, with a warning that clearly says not to set it as the wallpaper of an android phone. But of course, we should see for ourselves, right? As expected, hundreds of people attempted it, despite the warning and the results shared by others, and willingly crashed their expensive phones.
WARNING！！！
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. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020
The image depicts a sunset by a lake, surrounded by mountains and trees. But this silent devil carries a faulty color profile, and surprisingly, it’s from Google Skia. The image is too high in quality to be set as a wallpaper, so the Android System UI crashes when it’s done. And guess what, so many Android phones were crashed for nothing, solely due to the curiosity of their users. Many people took the warning as a personal warning, set the original image as their wallpaper, wrecked their phones and literally dug their own graves.
Source: Twitter / @UniverseIce
The image can be made harmless by either editing or screen-shotting, as they can overwrite the troublesome color profile. When the phone is crashed, some phones can be recovered by simply rebooting into safe mode and changing the wallpaper, but for some, a complete factory reset might be required.
#1
…In contrast, most images are encoded in sRGB. In Android 10 and older, there’s a rare bug that can occur when converting the image to sRGB. (All images are converted to sRGB unless otherwise specified by devs in Android 10 or older.)…
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) June 2, 2020
#2
…The problem with this calculation is that it always rounds the final value up. The “cursed” wallpaper has the following RGB values: 255, 255, 243, which when plugged into the above equation results in:
Luminance = .2126 * 255 + .7152 * 255 + .0722 * 243 = 256
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) June 2, 2020
#3
This bug does not affect Android 11 because the image’s “Skia” color space is not converted to sRGB by default, thus this rounding error and color space conversion error can’t occur.
More details: https://t.co/Wj1DmeZMLq
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) June 2, 2020
If you’ve already set the wallpaper and committed the sin, your phone might be stuck in a boot-loop, or will kick back to the bootloader. Therefore, there are several ways that this issue can be fixed: If your phone boots into safe mode, be quick and set a normal wallpaper. If your phone has custom recovery on it, go to the app and purge the data of the wallpaper to reset it back to default. If these methods do not work, congrats! it’s time to go to the bootloader and factory reset your phone.
Romain Guy, a Google representative, commented on the issue as: “Yeah the color space conversion is unrelated, the real problem is the way luminance is computed.”
Both Samsung and Google are actively working to fix the issue. Hopefully, the fix will be out with the next security fix in July.