WARNING! Never set this picture as wallpaper on your phone

A picture, featuring a landscape with mountains, clouds, and a lake in vivid colours is currently circulating on social media, and it has been reported to be crashing users devices.

This is not a joke. Please, never set the picture as the wallpaper for your phone. Don’t try it! It will cause your phone to crash!

The issue seems to affect not a particular range of devices but handsets from companies, including Google and Samsung.

Users on social media have also reported that apart from Google and Samsung, some OnePlus, Nokia, and Xiaomi phones are also impacted by the bug.

Reports suggest that there is no clear pattern of which devices are impacted by the wallpaper and which are not.

WARNING！！！
Never set this picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users!
It will cause your phone to crash!
Don't try it!
If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL

— ICE UNIVERSE (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020

The affected users aren’t able to resolve the issue until they factory reset their phone.

This means that by using the image as a wallpaper on your phone, you may end up losing all your personal data.

So, it is recommended to avoid using this wallpaper on your primary device.

The exact reason behind the issue is still a mystery. However, a look at what experts believe, it could be due to a bug in the Android system that restricts the colour space of the image causing the crash.

So, this is happening with a Pixel 3 XL with Android 10, but not on a Pixel 4 XL with Android 11. Here's what's happening: https://t.co/mXebJzJZ7Y

— Dylan Roussel (@evowizz) May 31, 2020

…this is not verified.

This means that an image with a Color Space that isn't supported will likely cause a crash on that device if it is set as the wallpaper.

So what's the Color Space of this image? RGB. pic.twitter.com/bSxyJIIy8S

— Dylan Roussel (@evowizz) May 31, 2020

RGB is a color model, not a color space. Non-sRGB color spaces doesn't mean values outside of the 0..255 range. This is a separate thing as well. What is more likely a simply a rounding error either in the color space conversion or in the luma conversion done for the histogram

— Romain Guy (@romainguy) June 3, 2020

Google has provided support for the usual ‘Standard RGB’ (sRGB) format in its Android operating system. However, there are various images that don’t have the usual sRGB format.

Meanwhile, Davide Bianco, a lead developer of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository-based custom ROM POSP has submitted a patch that is claimed to resolve the issue.

The patch describes, “the issue occurs when the user tries to set as wallpaper an image that is not sRGB. What happens is that variable y value is higher than the histogram bounds, making SysUI crash”.