- A particular image of a sunset over a lake is causing some Android phones to malfunction when set as a wallpaper, according to Twitter users.
- Security experts believe it has to do with a glitch in how Android software understands color space.
- Popular Mechanics has reached out to Google to learn more.
If you've ever seen a double rainbow (all the way), your brain probably felt like it was on sensory overload. Look at all of those colors! How is it even possible for something to be so stunning?
Unfortunately for Android users, intricate color patterns are equally overwhelming, but instead of creating a feeling of awe—computers don't really feel yet—some splashy images can actually lead to a system malfunction. Exhibit A: the lead photo for this story, which is causing some real-life glitches on Samsung and Pixel devices when users set it as a wallpaper.
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It looks like the issue first popped up sometime last month. Twitter user @universeice first posted about it on May 31, saying the photo was dangerous to Samsung phones and "will cause your phone to crash."
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Soon after, other users began to reply with similar tales of woe. In a video, @mfakhrihdnpng showed off how the glitch works. After setting their wallpaper to the image—which depicts a cotton candy sunset over a lake surrounded by trees—the screen on their Samsung device immediately turned black and began to glitch, as if the screen were shaking. In some cases, users said it took a factory reset to rectify the problem.
Interestingly, after @universeice uploaded the raw image to Weibo, a Chinese blogging website, the colors changed slightly, and after he downloaded it again, the image was harmless. But after posting it to Twitter, the colors did not change, and upon download, the photo continued to cause the erratic behavior.
According to an independent analysis from the BBC, the colors in the image are quite literally shaking things up.
Ken Munro and Dave Lodge, two researchers at the cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners, told the BBC the glitch likely has to with the concept of "color space," or the mathematical models that describe the range of colors in an image. The most well-known scheme is RGB, which stands for red, green, blue, because every image is some combination of those three colors. The numbers associated with those three colors help your smartphone display just the right shade of pink, for example.
"There are different ways of defining the colour space," the researchers said. "Some spaces have specialist uses in graphic design, so sometimes you'll see images that aren't in the usual 'Standard RGB' format. It's also possible to deliberately create images that have more colour information than some devices can handle."
The most likely explanation? Android software isn't able to deal with these outlier color schemes, which makes the phones crash. "The software developers probably hadn't considered this might happen," the researchers said.
Popular Mechanics has reached out to Google about the issue and will update this story when we learn more.
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Why This Image Is Causing Android Phones to Crash - Popular Mechanics
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