Android Phones
This Wallpaper is Breaking Phones
Let’s dive in to find out, Why?
In a matter of days, thousands of android users have been complaining of losing their phones to this stunning image of a lake.
The moment you try to set this image as your wallpaper, most of the android phones will succumb to the wallpaper and die. You would lose all your data in a matter of seconds and never be able to recover in some cases. According to other iOS users, the iPhones handle the picture well, but I would not recommend you to try it.
Firstly when I got to know about the issue, I thought it would be a nasty mischief by someone who got the hold of a bug and created an image exploiting that bug to destroy other android phones. These kinds of bugs keep up popping up now and then.
So, I decided to find the original image and get to the roots of the problem. Using the reverse image search option, I found the original photograph and downloaded the file.
On further research, I found that the photo is not any graphic creation, but a photograph originally shot on Nikon D850 and processed using the ProPhoto RGB color scheme.
There was nothing unusual with the photograph, and nothing seemed to be off.
I do not have many phones to try and experiment with such issues, so I consulted some of my friends and found a Galaxy S-10 to mess around with. Then I transferred the original photo to the S-10 and set it as wallpaper. That very moment the phone crashed. Nothing seemed to work.
Even after rebooting the phone to Safe Mode, I could not recover the Galaxy S-10 and had to factory reset the phone to get it back to life.
Now, this issue bamboozled the heck out of me. It was just an image, like all the wallpapers, but Android could not handle it, WHY? I went on searching, and on investigation, it came out as an error of code relating to color schemes in Android. Some manufacturers have better display cards, so their tweaks in OS help them save their phones from this bug, but most of the phones die instantly.
I repeat, do not try this with your phone, this thing kills the phone in seconds.
All the problem lies in the color scheme of the wallpaper, let us understand this using an info-graphic.
The photo in question, uses the ProPhoto RGB color scheme, this is the widest range of all the color schemes and does not adhere to sRGB standard used by Android phones.
The problem lies in the combination of colors used in the ProPhoto RGB scheme. These colors are way out of the scope of the sRGB color scheme. Due to this Android fails to convert the colors into reproducible form, hence crashing the phones.
On further research and calculations, it came out to be a problem with the code in Android pixel illumination.
0.2126(Red)+0.7152(Green)+0.0722(Blue)= Pixel Luminance
Majorly all the colors are classified into three basic colors, and all other colors are made using the color combinations using the above formula.
Some pixels in this photo surpass this range. The maximum color values for the normal color range is 255(Max), hence no matter what, the color luminance cannot exceed the 255 limit.
Some pixels in this photo are too bright for the Android devices to handle. This is all due to a simple fault, in the way Android handles these calculations for the color luminance, it simply rounds off the values to the nearest integer. This way, the pixel luminance races past the 255 limit and ends up crashing the phone the very moment it tries to process the image.
The Photo included in the story is not the original photo but just a screenshot, so no need to worry. It has been observed that screenshot taken on the Android phone serves well for the those who like the photo and can’t resist to use this as wallpaper.
To the creators out there please do not upload wallpapers in ProPhoto RGB. This small mistake on your end has costed thousands of users to lose their precious data.
