How can a simple image crash an Android phone to the point that it becomes unusable?
It’s a question that came out frequently over the past 24 hours, as news of a “cursed wallpaper” spread around the web.
The wallpaper crash explained
Here’s a recap: Setting a particular image as wallpaper can send some phones into a loop of crashes that makes them unusable.
There are a few solutions, depending on how hard the phone is hit. Some users were able to change the wallpaper in the short interval between crashes. Others had success deleting the wallpaper using the recovery tool TWRP. But in most cases, the only solution was to reset the phone to factory settings, losing any data that’s not backed up.
The issue was brought to light by Ice Universe, the Chinese Twitter users known for leaks. Based on user reports, many models from Samsung and Google are affected, while we’ve also seen some reports from users of OnePlus, Nokia, and Xiaomi devices (it’s not clear if these latter devices ran stock software or custom ROMs). From our own testing and looking at user reports, Huawei devices seem to be less exposed to the wallpaper crash issue.
The issue affects up-to-date phones running Android 10, but as it turns out, it’s not actually new. Users have been reporting similar problems for a couple of years, and just last month Android Police reported on what appears to be a closely related issue specifically impacting Pixel phones running the Google Wallpapers app.We asked a developer what’s going on
It’s a weird problem that has the potential to become a wider issue, especially if trolls get involved. It’s easy to envision unsavory characters boobytrapping wallpapers and sending them to unsuspecting users as a “prank.”
So, what’s going on?
We’ve seen a few explanations for the issue, most of them involving the color space of the image, which goes beyond what Android’s SystemUI can handle and causes a crash.
To get a better idea of what’s going with this Android wallpaper crash, we reached out to Davide Bianco, one of the lead developers of the POSP custom ROM project, who submitted an initial patch for the issue to the AOSP bug tracker.
The bad news is the issue is now out in the open, and you can bet that some people will use it for mischief. More concerningly, this bug (or a very similar one) appears to have been an issue for at least a couple of years, with no visible action from Google.
Also bad news: if you fall victim to a prank (or your own curiosity), there’s no easy, pain-free method to undo it. At least factory reset remains as a last resort, but we still wouldn’t recommend trying it on your own device.
The good news is this seems to be a straightforward bug, rather than malware or anything more nefarious. We say “seems” because we haven’t heard from Google back for confirmation. Also good news: this bug will not be an issue once Android 11 lands later this year.
