The Wallpaper That Kills Your Smatphone?
In recent news there is a certain wallpaper that is circulating across social media that supposedly kills your phone. We recently learned that wallpaper causes devices to crash and become unusable. Several Android smartphone users reported that a wallpaper with a landscape of mountains, clouds and a lake was crashing their android phone. Even the famous leakster Ice universe tweeted, warning users not to use the wallpaper.
But here like in movies when someone tells you not to do it and that typically makes you want to do that thing even more so just to see what could possibly happen?
Well that is exactly what happened when a prominent hacker tweeted out that there was a certain image on the internet that, if uploaded as a wallpaper, would kill your phone. Many, of course, went ahead and uploaded that image as their phone’s wallpaper causing their phones to crash.
The problem mainly occurs in Samsung and pixel phones running Android 10. And the only way to restore your phone is to do a factory reset thus loosing your apps and data.
You may ask, what harm can a wallpaper that consist of a landscape with mountains, clouds and a lake do to your phone?
According to a YouTuber MrWhoseTheBoss in a recent video of his stated that this was happening due to a single pixel in the image, which was sending Android phones using the Google Image processing engine into an error loop.
He says this is happening due to Android restricting the colour space to 255, as the operating system supports the Standard RGB (sRGB) format to display images, which can be capped at 255 luminance. The image was encoded in ProPhoto RGB format which has a wider range than sRGB, however, that is not the problem. The problem is with one pixel that was taking the image variables to 256 luminance and crashing the devices.
MrWhoseTheBoss in his video states this can easily be fixed with a line of code in the source of Android, which states that if the variables of a pixel are at over 255 luminance, then the system should convert it directly to 255 luminance and then open.
According to Android Toolkit team lead at Google, Romanian Guy in a reply to a tweet said that the problem is not the colour space conversion issue that most people were pointing at, instead, it is being caused due to how the luminance is computed. Thus solidifying MrWhoseTheBoss’ findings.
In a report by 9to5Google, the publication said the bug does not affect devices running Android 11 beta version. They also said the bug does not affect Huawei devices and some more heavily tweaked versions of Android.
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