Remember the Beautiful Sunset Photo? Here is Why it was Crashing Android Phones

Today in “2020 is just the weirdest timeline”, there’s a cursed wallpaper making the rounds and crashing the Android phones of fools idiotic enough to not heed the warnings that accompany the image, seen to the right. It’s a pretty sunset on a lake surrounded by mountains and forest, right? Well, hidden in the coding for this image is apparently an improperly coded color profile — and a Google color profile, at that — and when you set it as a wallpaper on an Android phone, it will cause the Android System UI to crash.

The image has been making the rounds across social media — because we Android nerds are a curious lot and when we hear something will mess up our phones, we apparently take that as a personal challenge — and has been wrecking havoc on phones of the idiots stupid enough to set the original image as their wallpaper. If you screenshot the image or edit the image in an way, it strips out and overwrites the problematic color profile data, so once you tamper with it, it becomes harmless, but to save all the curious cats out there

Many Android users have reported that a seemingly innocent photo of a glorious sunset was breaking their smartphones when they set it as their wallpaper. But no one really knew why till the photographer himself opened up about it.

The photo is that of a beautiful sunset against a cloudy sky, and has a lake and greenery in the foreground as well. It is not very different from other photos that you usually set as wallpapers. Then why are Android users blaming this photograph for crashing their phones?

When this cursed image is set as the wallpaper, users are reporting the phone crashing and getting stuck in a bootloop. Some users got it fixed by accessing Safe Mode and changing the wallpaper, but many have had to factory reset their smartphone, ending up losing all their data.

Why is a wallpaper crashing phones?

While it’s still not completely clear, it seems like an incorrectly coded Google colour profile in the image is causing the image to wreak havoc on smartphones. In one of the discussions on Twitter about this lethal wallpaper, a Google representative named Romain Guy said “the real problem is the way luminance is computed.”

Tags:- wallpaper, Crashed wallpaper, wallpaper crashing android, crushed wallpaper, android crash by wallpaper