Oliver Haslam on June 2, 2020, 8:03 pm

PSA: This Wallpaper Will Crash And Soft-Brick Your Android Phone, Here’s Why

The more complicated and powerful smartphones become, the more chance there is that something will go wrong. And it often happens in some very strange ways, too.

Like this latest bug that allows some Android phones to be completely confused by nothing more than a wallpaper.

Spotted by leaker, Ice Universe, and then confirmed by 9to5Google, the wallpaper is particularly troublesome to Samsung phones. But nobody seems to know why yet.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, this simple image is causing some Android phone to crash and then enter a state of being soft-bricked when the image is set as a wallpaper. Upon being set, the device crashes and continually turns the screen on and off on the lockscreen. There’s no way to leave this loop as even a reboot causes the phone to keep doing this after turning back on.

We’ve also heard reports of the same thing happening on Pixel phones, and we’d obviously suggest that you don’t go trying this yourself.

One suggestion is that the impacted phones don’t properly support the RGB color space that the image is encoded in. Apparently Android phones prefer SRGB, although whatever the reason it really shouldn’t result in a phone doing what these Android phones are doing!

Until Android is fixed, either by the phone makers or Google itself, we’d suggest avoiding this image like the plague.