This Wallpaper May Brick Your Android Phone

Jun. 1, 2020

A new wallpaper that is doing the rounds on the internet is soft-bricking several Android phones. Yes,simply setting the wallpaper may potentially render your phone useless.

Brought to attention by popular leaksterIce Universe, the image primarily affects Samsung phones. However, there are reports suggesting that Pixel phones are not immune as well.

In case you’re wondering how this is happening, severalRedditand Twitter users say it has something to do with the image’s color profile.The image uses Google’s Skia RGB profile, which is the root cause of the crash.

As9to5Google‘s Dylan Roussel points out, thewallpaper doesn’t crash on phones runningAndroid 11since it automatically converts incompatible image color spaces to sRGBwhile that’s not exactly the case withAndroid 10and below. That said, considering Android’s fragmentation, it will probably take months until your device gets Android 11 update, unless you own a Pixel device, of course.

You can, however, use the image after converting it to sRGB in case you are obsessed with it. Either way, you’re probably better off staying away from random eye-catchy wallpapers found through multiple sources until this issue gets fixed.

We would highly recommend you not to try this on your phone. People who were feeling adventurous have ended up soft-bricking their phones.To recover your phone, you will have to reset your devicefrom the bootloader, which will result in the loss of data.

If you’ve seen pranksters circulating the image on various groups, I would personally recommend you step up and make them understand the seriousness of the issue, since smartphones serve as the primary source of communication for a majority of people and there are many other significant things to worry about during these tough times.

Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.