Imagine that you are searching the Internet for some beautiful wallpaper and find a picturesque picture of the landscape. It has it all: dense forests, pristine lakes, and an island with beautiful snow-capped mountains in the background and thick clouds that soak in sunlight. You get hooked, download the image, set it as your phone’s wallpaper, and start using it. Then your Android phone goes boot-crash. In the cycle of. It sounds unlikely, but it’s a real thing, and the culprit is this picture:


Samsung phone crash sorted out


On May 31, a user named Ice Universe shared the above wallpaper on Twitter, claiming it “will crash your phone.” Despite warnings not to try it, he wasn’t joking, many users downloaded the wallpaper to see if what he said was true — and if it would crash your phone

Twitter discussion address is as follows: https://twitter.com/UniverseIce/status/1266943909499826176

Setting the wallpaper causes the Samsung system to crash as follows:

Then the comments section wailed:

Sebastian: Unfortunately, this is an Android bug, and so is Google’s Pixels series of phones!

Dawood: This is the most bullshit bug I’ve ever seen. I even turned on safe mode and still couldn’t get away with it. I had to go back to factory mode to do something.


Jason Ashley: Well, I tested this in a simulator. The SystemUI crashes. Tried to check for any strange problems with the image header, but due to my limited JPEG knowledge, I didn’t find any. And it did.

Vl1: I just tried it and now I have to restore it to factory Settings.

Nokia phones have the same problems. My Nokia 7 Plus crashed and rebooted repeatedly. Does anyone know how to fix it? I need some help, thank you

Ahmed Alkaab: Damn, it did damage my Samsung Note 9

According to the feedback in the comment section of This Twitter, Samsung, Google Pixels, Nokia and some other mobile phones have this problem. Domestic manufacturers such as Huawei, Xiaomi and OnePlus are not affected.

The problem tracking

What exactly caused the phone to crash? The picture is enchanted? Apparently not. According to Davide Bianco, development lead for aOSP-based custom ROMs, this “special” wallpaper causes some Android devices to crash because it uses an RGB color space instead of the sRGB color space that Android supports native.

Bianco has submitted a patch that reportedly fixes the issue, with a description stating that the issue is caused when users try to set non-SRGB images as wallpaper. What happens is that the value of variable Y is higher than the range of histogram, causing SysUI to collapse. One possible solution is to always limit the y value to less than 256.


The renowned LineageOS custom ROM team, together with Xian Bianco, developed the unique solution by XDA Senior member BadDaemon and XDA recognized developer LucA020400.

A report from 9to5Google further reveals that the issue is limited to devices running Android 10 or more, and that it does not affect devices running Android 11 developer preview. This is because on Android 11, the system will switch color Spaces if they are not supported, but not on Android 10.

Google’s Latest Response

As explained by XDA premium member BadDaemon and XDA recognized developer LucA020400, it is the extensions that cause the bug. The “cursed” pictures coding in a specific color space, the color space is called “Google/Skia/E3CADAB7BD3DE5E3436874D2A9DEE126” this is the full name of the color space, Skia refers to Google to make 2 d graphics library.) . Instead, most other wallpaper images are encoded in a color space called sRGB.

In Android 10 and earlier, all images will be converted to sRGB unless otherwise specified by the developer. A rare error can occur when converting images to sRGB, where the code that calculates the “luminance” value for each pixel manages to exceed the maximum limit of 255.

Use the following formula to calculate brightness:

Luminance = .2126f * r + .7152f * g + .0722f * b
Copy the code

Here, “r,” “G,” and “b” are red, green, and blue, represented by 8-bit values from 0 to 255.

The problem with this calculation is that it always rounds the final value. In the process of converting the image from sRGB to grayscale, one of the pixels in the “cursed” wallpaper has the following RGB values: 255, 255, 243, when inserted into the formula above, it looks like this:

Luminance = .2126 * (255) + .7152 * (255) + .0722 * (243)
Luminance = 256
Copy the code

Luminance exceeded 255, a value that caused SystemUI to crash, and basically the entire OS to crash because it exceeded the maximum. This error is very specific because it involves rounding errors and color space conversion errors.

This error does not affect Android 11, as the “Skia” color space of images is not converted to sRGB by default. Therefore, this color space conversion error and rounding error does not occur on Android 11.

However, According to Romain Guy from Google’s Android Toolkit team, the root cause of the problem is simply the way brightness is calculated, not any color space conversion issues. Google is conducting its own internal tests, so we may see their final results soon.

How to restore

Please note that while this issue does not affect all Android devices, we strongly recommend that you do not try to use wallpaper on your phone. If you have, try the following:

  • 1. Go into safe mode and change the wallpaper to restore the device. The operation of Samsung mobile phone is: when the Samsung Logo screen appears on the startup screen, press and hold the volume down button until the word “safe mode” appears. After entering the screen, take a photo and set it as the wallpaper. (Although some Twiiter users said this method could not be recovered.)

  • 2. Restore factory Settings (data loss)

For the time being, there are only two temporary solutions. Google is already working on fixing this issue and will probably release it with a system update. Therefore, it is best not to use exact images as wallpaper. If you really like wallpaper, just take a screenshot of the image and use it as a wallpaper.

Finally, don’t be curious to try!

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