Strange reason why this 'cursed' wallpaper can kill your phone instantly
We all like to add a bit of personalization to our lives, and with most of us running to the shop to buy the latest smartphone like the sheep we are, chances are that many of you and your friends have the same model. Setting your background is a lot harder than you think - do you post your favorite music artist, a cute pet pic, or when do you make it official with your other half and show the world your love by having them as your wallpaper?
We're being warned against one specific wallpaper that could apparently brick your phone and cost a small fortune to fix.
As pointed out by MrwhosetheBoss, there's one particular wallpaper that Samsung owners need to look out for. The popular tech streamer says that he was even a victim of the scam himself, being among those who had their entire phone wiped by one picturesque picture.
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There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for what was causing the crashes, with some people gleefully setting the picture as their background and bragging about having a 'superior' phone.
MrwhosetheBoss decided to do some digging and spent days figuring out what the flip (phone) was going on.
His original thought process was that it was malware, designed by someone to target Android phones and crash them.
The resolution is exactly 1440 x 2560, which is the standard Android wallpaper, but doing a reverse image search, MrwhosetheBoss tried to trace its source and determined it wasn't malware.
The colors within the original photograph were what was sending Android phones to the grave.
While phones are typically calibrated to the sRGB color spectrum, the original photo was in the ProPhotoRGB spectrum, and because it was stretching the color spectrum, it was causing the phones to crash. Android phones were struggling to convert just one pixel from ProPhoto into sRGB. While your phone would normally just close the process, setting the image as a wallpaper sent them into a never-ending spiral of doom where it was constantly shutting itself down.
Taking a screenshot of the wallpaper worked fine because Android was creating a brand-new version that was in sRGB instead of trying to convert the troublesome original.
Things have now been fixed by just a single line of code, and in the video, MrwhosetheBoss admits that it's unlikely we'd encounter this problem again because it was just an anomaly. Still, iPhone users are looking pretty smug right now.