Google seems to have found out why a wallpaper is causing Android phones to crash

Abhishek Jariwala
By Abhishek Jariwala
3 Min Read

We have had a lot of instances in the smartphone world where a wallpaper, message or even a simple looking text would do so much harm to a phone that it would become a cause of the crash. Similarly, a new incident came to light last week when UniverseIce, a popular celebrity on Twitter, known for his accurate Samsung leaks wrote a PSA in which he shared a wallpaper and told people not to set this as their wallpaper.

This was because he found out that the said wallpaper was crashing Samsung phones in particular. However, everyone did what they were told not to and set the wallpaper on their phones to check if it really crashed the phones or not.

And Ice was not wrong because the wallpaper did crash most Samsung phones and even some non-Samsung Android phones to crash and boot loop. The only way people had left after this crash was to do a factory reset which is obviously not recommended when you have data inside.

This was the reason why they were told not to do so and everyone paid the price for it. Talking about personal experience, our team’s OnePlus phones were found to be safe on setting the wallpaper but some Pixel phones were also crashing.

Now that most publications have picked up on this report, Google has come out to explain why it feels this wallpaper is making Android phones to crash and the company seems to have cracked the mystery as reported by Android Police.

While some believed that the wallpaper’s colour space is out of Android’s range and this is why it is causing the phone to panic and crash. But Google’s Romain Guy says that colour space is not why the phones are crashing but it is due to luminance. It is also said that both Samsung and Google are working on a fix for this issue and there is also a “separate internal solution under review”.

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We have had a lot of instances in the smartphone world where a wallpaper, message or even a simple looking text would do so much harm to a phone that it would become a cause of the crash. Similarly, a new incident came to light last week when UniverseIce, a popular celebrity on Twitter, known for his accurate Samsung leaks wrote a PSA in which he shared a wallpaper and told people not to set this as their wallpaper.

This was because he found out that the said wallpaper was crashing Samsung phones in particular. However, everyone did what they were told not to and set the wallpaper on their phones to check if it really crashed the phones or not.

And Ice was not wrong because the wallpaper did crash most Samsung phones and even some non-Samsung Android phones to crash and boot loop. The only way people had left after this crash was to do a factory reset which is obviously not recommended when you have data inside.

This was the reason why they were told not to do so and everyone paid the price for it. Talking about personal experience, our team’s OnePlus phones were found to be safe on setting the wallpaper but some Pixel phones were also crashing.

Now that most publications have picked up on this report, Google has come out to explain why it feels this wallpaper is making Android phones to crash and the company seems to have cracked the mystery as reported by Android Police.

While some believed that the wallpaper’s colour space is out of Android’s range and this is why it is causing the phone to panic and crash. But Google’s Romain Guy says that colour space is not why the phones are crashing but it is due to luminance. It is also said that both Samsung and Google are working on a fix for this issue and there is also a “separate internal solution under review”.

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