Cursed wallpaper soft-bricks several Android phones: Details and possible workarounds

[Redaktion]

It has been found that a certain wallpaper can soft-brick several Android phones particularly newer Samsung phones and Google Pixels. Apparently, this is due to Android's SystemUI not being able to handle the higher Google Skia color gamut of the image leading to a crash and boot loop. While not all phones are affected, it is advised that users do not attempt to use this image as a wallpaper in daily-driver phones.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Cursed-wallpaper-soft-bricks-several-Android-phones-Details-and-possible-workarounds.467536.0.html

[Andy M]

Damn! Did someone die at this location and decided to curse....all the user's phone who would put this place as their wallpaper ?

A wallpaper soft bricking phone ! what a time to be alive !

[Vaidyanathan]

Damn! Did someone die at this location and decided to curse....all the user's phone who would put this place as their wallpaper ?

A wallpaper soft bricking phone ! what a time to be alive !

A precarious situation for sure. There is every possibility that such bugs would be exploited by those putting up seemingly harmless wallpapers for download as the average user might not be aware of such technicalities.

It goes without saying that every smartphone user — iOS, Android, or any other — should ensure that their important data such as contacts, photos, mail, IM, SMS, etc. are always backed up or synced to a cloud service at all times.

To further avoid remorse, users must make it a habit to check their sync or backup status as frequently as possible as such issues can crop up with any file type.

[DougJudy]

This at least makes sense, the laucher crashes because of the color profile of the background. It makes sense, not ideal but there's a clear cause and effect.
Contrary to the iphone that dies with a keyboard symbol, a lot weirder if you ask me (i'm not trying to bash apple or anything, it's just a weirder issue imo)

[_MT_]

This at least makes sense, the laucher crashes because of the color profile of the background. It makes sense, not ideal but there's a clear cause and effect.
Contrary to the iphone that dies with a keyboard symbol, a lot weirder if you ask me (i'm not trying to bash apple or anything, it's just a weirder issue imo)

It's also a much simpler problem. Character rendering can get involved. And it's something done a lot so it has to be fast. Who knows what they're doing there but it's probably some weird edge case.

This code seems weird to me. In RGB, I would expect red, green and blue to be 0-255 each (and it should be so according to documentation). So the Y should be 0-765. I would expect them to take an average if not something more complex when building a histogram. I find it surprising that it works at all. And it must be as slow as a wet week (a hyperbole).

[tefached]

I have no knowledge about technology whatsoever, so my question may seem stupid... I was wondering wether this wallpaper affects pcs as well, or not.