Android Phone Crashing Photo
What you see above is the image we’re talking about. However, you need not worry about viewing this photo on your phones since this picture has been dramatically altered.
Gaurav Agrawal, the man behind this picture, is not only a photographer but also a scientist. Surprisingly, this image was taken a year ago at the Glacier National Park in Montanna and has gotten popular only recently, when people found out that it was causing Android 10 phones to crash.
Now when we take a look at exactly why this problem is occurring, the default color rendering engine of Android 10 is to be blamed. The image was edited using Lightroom and exported with extra-wide HDR color space, which was a bit too much for Google’s engine to handle. Accordingly, when someone set this image as their wallpaper, the phone would restart every time the engine would attempt to display the picture.
Although a boot loop was the result, it was pretty easy to get the phone back to normal as users would just have to perform a factory reset, which ultimately causes them to lose all their device data. However, in case you have your important stuff stored on the Cloud, there’s pretty much nothing to worry about.
Apart from that, Agrawal claimed that he didn’t know that this photo would cause any issue since he uses an iPhone and has never set this image as its wallpaper. As you’d expect, the photographer had no clue that the picture would become so famous but for all the wrong reasons.
It is also worth mentioning that not all Android phones are experiencing this issue. Getting into specifics, older devices, and other Android phones such as those by Nokia are able to set this image as their wallpaper without even restarting once. The reason for this is that these phones use a color rendering engine that’s not from Google. With that being said, it doesn’t mean that Nokia users are safe to use this image as there’s still some risk involved that’s definitely not worth taking.
On the bright side, the Android Open Source Project now contains patches that’ll fix this issue, all thanks to the efforts of Android developers. Other than that, Android 11 Beta has also proved to be unaffected by this image as it can even work with unsupported color spaces. Plus, you can get to know even more about what causes this bug by clicking here.
As a consequence of what this image has done to a lot of phones, the photographer stated that it’s about time to move to another image format.
Conclusion
It’s quite surprising to see that such a beautiful, harmless-looking photo could be so damaging for a lot of phones. Luckily, the folks at Google have already gotten to the problem and apparently figured out a solution for this. However, Android users are better off sticking to other wallpapers if they don’t want to end up doing a factory reset.