This ‘Cursed’ Wallpaper Crashes Your Phone With Its Color Profile

Cursed’ Wallpaper Crashes Your Phone

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.

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.

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.

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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.