The cursed wallpaper crashing Android phones, finally explained | How THIS wallpaper kills your phone! | ThePostHub

Me : 2020 cant get worst!

2020: WALLPAPER BREAKS MOBILE PHONES!!!

The wallpaper that crashes Android phones!

How the real picture looks

        Many smartphones almost broke down worldwide, last month, just because of a wallpaper. Can you believe it?. These smartphones range from lower end budget phones to higher end ones such as Samsung S20 Ultra smartphone. On applying the wallpaper, you won't even be able to get past the lock screen or even safe mode. The only option left to you will be to Hard Reset the phone leading to the loss of all the phone data. All these problems were due to a very simple photo.

People are spreading this wallpaper, don't apply it! Please!!

        As we see here, the photo is just simple, which captures a landscape with mountains and some kind of water source. Why would such a photo or a wallpaper impact the whole phone, intrigued me. Hence I dug a little deeper into the research and here's what I found out about it.

        First of all let me tell you, it affects almost all android phones like Google, Samsung and many more. It doesn't seem to affect IPhones. Let's look more into the difference later. If at all someone shows you the picture, on their Samsung smartphones, trust me it will be just a screenshot or something similar to the original version.

        My initial assumption was this can be a malware. Someone purposely designed this wallpaper to conflict with the code of the Android device which crashes the phone.

        Did some experiments on this and found these observations:

1) The photo when uploaded to social media platforms and downloaded back, the color automatically gets converted to a less vibrant version.

2) The resolution is exactly 1440x2560, which is the current standard android wallpaper resolution. So, it is clear that the intention was for it to be used as a wallpaper.

        The best way to find the hidden motive behind the wallpaper is to do a reverse image search with the help of Google Images. It helps you to find similar images that is available in the internet. It's found that the original photo was not the one which got circulated as Phone wallpaper. The original is a widescreen image which was taken normally in a Nikon D80 camera. Surely, that can't be the problem, as it's a pretty much a common camera with common settings. 

        Now let's talk about the technical aspects of the image. Actually considering the color, there is wide range of colors that can be distinctly perceived by human eye, but the man-made devices are set to identify or understand only a part of it. For example the sRGB space is a small part of the spectrum which the android devices can understand and analyze. To be honest, sRGB is the format used by almost every day to day device like digital camera, printer or the social media platform . Which means, when we post an image to Instagram we can make sure that the viewer is able to see the same color that we intend to show from our side. Other color spaces are AdobeRGB which has a wider range of color or ProPhotoRGB which is even wider. In simple words, when I convert an image from one color space to another its color space effectively gets stretched.

        Coming back to our photo, it turns out that prophotoRGB is what the image is encoded in. So when I convert it back to sRGB it becomes less vibrant like this:

      This establishes that something about the color space is causing our problem, but we have an issue there - Android can handle ProphotoRGB even though it supports only sRGB. Yes, android is programmed to convert images from any other color space back to sRGB just so that we can have that level of consistency. So, during the conversion is when the real problem arises. It turns out that the reason behind all the devices crashing, comes to a Single Pixel. The google's color engine converter is not able to convert just a single pixel in the entire image, specifically the luminance of the pixel or called brightness, causing a system crash. Surprising right?

        Let's check that single pixel. In an RGB value, it gives green the most weight then red and then blue. Anyway the maximum value of red-green-blue individually is 255, so the way this code is put together is that you shouldn't be able to get an overall combined value above 255 because it's taking a weighted average of all three. But in our case, the individual values are 54.213(red), 182.376(green) and 17.5446(blue), the average value coming around 254 which is under 255. The problem is when google rounds each color's value to get an average, hence the sum becomes 55+183+18 = 256, which is above the theoretical value of 255.

        ERROR!!!

        1 number in 1 pixel is enough for you to enter your device into this spiral of doom. You just needed a single line of code saying if the value is above 255 then make it 255, and that's it.

        In a normal situation, like when you open the image in your gallery if this problem occurs the android will try to close the process. But when you set it as your wallpaper, it cannot close like that thereby entering into a permanent loop of errors since the android tried to fix the issue. This explains why it doesn't make a problem when you use screenshot of the image as the screenshot is already an sRGB format of the device.

        Finally, you might be wondering why only some of the smartphone brands are facing this issue, while others are unaffected. Well, this is because they are all phones which uses Google's default color engine which has this tiny bug in it. But you don't have to worry, because it's practically impossible to recreate this error and the next Android 11 should be fixing this for sure.

        Bottom-line is that, do not try to apply this wallpaper or if you are ready to take the risk, do it only after backing up your mobile device first.