This Serene-Looking Background Photo Will Cause Your Phone to Crash

The issue is said to affect mostly Google and Samsung phones running up to Android 10.

| Jun 07, 2020 03:19 AM EST

Created: Jun 07, 2020 03:19 AM EST

We all have the one serene background photo that instantly helps us relax. A mountain, a river, a sunset, all these elements bring us to a place better than where we are. But what if they could also crash your phone to crash?

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There is a new image circulating that people claim will make your phone crash if you set it as your background, reported Popular Science, and it has to do with its color spaces.

WARNING！！！
Never set this picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users!
It will cause your phone to crash!
Don't try it!
If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020

A color space decides what colors a device will actually display and what it will look like. Online, we mostly encounter RGB color spaces because they’re focused on the red, green, and blue pixels found in digital screens. But not all RGB spaces carry the same colors.

And Android phones are only built to handle the sRGB color space. This special background pic, however, uses a standard RGB colorspace that places some of the colors outside the operating system’s capabilities resulting in an error.

As of the time of this writing, the weird issue is said to affect mostly Google and Samsung phones running up to Android 10. If you are unlucky enough to set the image unwittingly as your background, your phone may just reboot over and over again.

The fix is rather easy: avoid that image. However, you always have a few daredevils who want to see first hand what calamity follows such disasters. For the rest of us folk who like to play it safe, there is no danger for our phones, and Google is even working on a fix.