Almost like a creepypasta - Wallpaper soft-bricks android phones

[williamcll]

Apparently an oddity with color profiles on android phones (Notably Samsung and Pixel but other phones are vulnerable as well) would cause the phone to crash on boot, possibly requiring a reset. Google was first notified of a similar issue back in 2018 but could not reproduce it.

Quote

The issue was reported by well-known leaker Universe Ice on Twitter and confirmed by dozens of other users. I tested it myself. First, foolishly, on my daily driver, the Mate 20 Pro, which doesn’t appear to be affected. I was able to replicate the issue on a Google Pixel 2. After setting the image in question as a wallpaper, the phone immediately crashed. It attempted to reboot, but the screen would constantly turn on and off, making it impossible to pass the security screen. Restarting the device in safe mode (by holding down the volume button during boot-up) did not fix the issue.

An issue with a very similar description has been reported in Google’s Android issue tracker back in 2018. At the time, Google developers said they were unable to reproduce the issue and closed it out (Hat tip: inverimus on Reddit). We’ve reached out to Google for clarification. According to several users on Reddit and Twitter, as well as Partha Sarathi Tripathy in our comments section, the issue is caused by the color profile of the image, which exceeds the bounds of what Android can handle, causing a crash.

Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/image-wallpaper-crash-soft-brick-1124505/
Thoughts: This is some sheer coincidence that somehow this specific mix of colors would soft brick a phone as Ice_universe on another tweet said that a color alteration would prevent the crash. Google better fix this quick without needing a full OS patch or else this could easily be a malware payload or some other forms of attack.

[5x5]

Brb, getting new phone under warranty.

[Curious Pineapple]

Inb4 "but muh eyefone dun hav dis bug init"

[NumLock21]

14 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Inb4 "but muh eyefone dun hav dis bug init"

but muh eyefone dun hav dis bug init

[vanished]

I'm not surprised.  I've experienced a similar issue myself once before.  I set an image as my wallpaper that, admittedly, was rather high resolution, probably much more so than most they would expect you to use, but that is no excuse for what happened.  It caused the launcher to get stuck in a loop of loading and then immediately crashing.  I had to factory reset the phone in order to resolve the issue.  Such a trivial, (what should be) harmless action should not be able to create such a serious problem.  That is just terrible software design, period.  The fact that the image should not have caused issues is not just my opinion either, I later tried it with the default launcher and it handled it fine, indicating it was indeed possible.

 

I can think of several layers of protection that Android should have against this sort of thing.  For one, any launcher should maintain a settings log of sorts, or a backup config file which consists of how everything was configured before the most recent change.  By doing this, it would be able to automatically revert any change if said change causes it to get stuck in a crashing loop.  Second, if you are using a custom launcher and the system detects that it has become stuck in a crashing loop, it should automatically revert to the default launcher.  Finally, If the problem persists, it should be capable of automatically performing a reset on the launcher without needing to format the entire phone.  I believe that all of these features would be relatively simple to implement, and given the presence of issues such as what I described, as well as what has been demonstrated in this news article, I also believe that to have them would not be excessive in the least.

[kpluck]

If it is a color profile problem why is it limited to this one picture? I would think some people wanting to stir things up a bit would be distributing all sorts of photos with the screwed up profile just for sh@ts and giggles.

 

-kp

[williamcll]

50 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Inb4 "but muh eyefone dun hav dis bug init"

 

35 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

but muh eyefone dun hav dis bug init

 

32 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Is this some kind of archaic dialect? 

Remember this? 

 

[BiG StroOnZ]

[CarlBar]

5 hours ago, kpluck said:

If it is a color profile problem why is it limited to this one picture? I would think some people wanting to stir things up a bit would be distributing all sorts of photos with the screwed up profile just for sh@ts and giggles.

 

-kp

 

I'm no expert but my takeaway is that much like the recently reported issue some US students had with the default apple phone photo format the issue is related in some way to the format the image is saved in and it's a format android phones don't typically encounter.

[CarlBar]

5 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I'm not surprised.  I've experienced a similar issue myself once before.  I set an image as my wallpaper that, admittedly, was rather high resolution, probably much more so than most they would expect you to use, but that is no excuse for what happened.  It caused the launcher to get stuck in a loop of loading and then immediately crashing.  I had to factory reset the phone in order to resolve the issue.  Such a trivial, (what should be) harmless action should not be able to create such a serious problem.  That is just terrible software design, period.  The fact that the image should not have caused issues is not just my opinion either, I later tried it with the default launcher and it handled it fine, indicating it was indeed possible.

 

I can think of several layers of protection that Android should have against this sort of thing.  For one, any launcher should maintain a settings log of sorts, or a backup config file which consists of how everything was configured before the most recent change.  By doing this, it would be able to automatically revert any change if said change causes it to get stuck in a crashing loop.  Second, if you are using a custom launcher and the system detects that it has become stuck in a crashing loop, it should automatically revert to the default launcher.  Finally, If the problem persists, it should be capable of automatically performing a reset on the launcher without needing to format the entire phone.  I believe that all of these features would be relatively simple to implement, and given the presence of issues such as what I described, as well as what has been demonstrated in this news article, I also believe that to have them would not be excessive in the least.

 

Let's be fair this is basic common feature set when for example changing the resolution of a program on windows, (including windows itself). Then again i suspect this is a classic case of somthing, (Android), having grown from somthing relatively small. Windows in it's own ways has a similar set of issues with introducing a lot of overhead and thus being bad compared to specialised solutions at many things explicitly because there's a lot of holdover stuff from an older era when such features weren't as important, (or weren't present).I suspect Android is suffering from these failings here because when it was originally conceived no one expected it to be in a position where it would need them, and so far there hasn't been a big enough pushback from consumers to make fixing the lacking of them a priority.

[RejZoR]

You'd expect it to clamp the color range if it's out of bounds, not accept it and commit harakiri...

[Results45]

Phones with the default color engine crash when Android doesn't know what to do when a pixel with a rounded color value above 255 is applied permanently.

 

Arun explains it well:

 

Perfect balance of info for nerds and non-techies.