The Photo That Broke Android Phones

Photographers post wallpaper-worthy photos all the time. We save them because we can’t take photos as beautiful as theirs, and there’s no harm in admitting that. I do it all the time. However, this particular photo of a sunset from landscape photographer Gaurav Agrawal did the unexpected. The photo often made android phones crash when set as wallpaper, PetaPixel details:

Unfortunately, when it came time to export and share the photo after a few edits in Adobe Lightroom, he picked the ProPhoto RGB color space; that, it seems, was the root of the problem.

The color space attached to the photo is unreadable by a large number of Android phones, mostly those by Google and Samsung. When set as the wallpaper on the standard version of Android 10, sRGB is required, and the disparity sent these phones into an infinite re-boot loop. The issue is referred to as a “soft-brick,” because it was often only fixable by performing a factory reset and losing any data that wasn’t backed up.

This fact was discovered and shared widely on Twitter, causing the photo to go viral and inadvertently leading to thousands of phones being bricked as some Android users couldn’t resist the temptation to try using the photo themselves.

Agrawal tells the BBC that he’s sad about what happened. Since he’s an iPhone user (and always uses a photo of his wife as his phone background) he had no idea that choosing the wrong color space could cause such a kerfuffle.

“I didn’t do anything intentionally. I’m sad that people ended up having issues.” says Agrawal. “I hoped my photograph would have gone ‘viral’ for a good reason, but maybe that’s for another time… I’m going to use another format from now on.”