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A landscape photo taken by photographer Gaurav Agrawal caused crash loops on some Android phones when users set it as their wallpaper in 2020. The reported bug was triggered by wallpaper processing—not simply by receiving or viewing the image—and contemporary testing showed different results across devices and Android versions. It is a historical software failure, not evidence that the photo crashes Android phones today.
What happened when people set the photo as wallpaper?
After Ice Universe warned Android users not to use the image as wallpaper, reports described some phones flickering or repeatedly crashing at the lock screen. Rebooting did not necessarily end the loop. A 9to5Google reporter reproduced the behavior on a Pixel 2, but also reported that viewing the same image in Google Photos did not trigger it. That distinction points to the phone’s wallpaper-processing path as the trigger, rather than the image merely being opened.
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Contemporary coverage used “soft-brick” to describe phones made temporarily unusable by the crash loop. It did not establish permanent physical damage. Reports also varied by device and software version, so the incident should not be generalized to all Android phones.
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Who took the photo, and where?
Agrawal told 9to5Google that he took the landscape photograph at St. Mary Lake in Montana’s Glacier National Park. He said he edited it in Lightroom and exported it in ProPhoto RGB. Those details describe the image’s creation; they do not mean Lightroom caused the failure.
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9to5Google’s June 10, 2020 report includes Agrawal’s account and a demonstration of the reported behavior.
What caused the crash?
The first detailed explanation, published by Android Authority, came from custom ROM developer Davide Bianco and was explicitly presented as his personal explanation. Bianco focused on Android SystemUI’s handling of non-sRGB images and described an out-of-bounds error during image processing.
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That theory was later corrected. Google engineer Romain Guy said the color-space conversion explanation was unrelated to the actual bug: “Yeah the color space conversion is unrelated, the real problem is the way luminance is computed.” Android Authority quoted him on June 4, 2020, in its report on Google and Samsung’s response. The key distinction is that the early explanation should not be repeated as the confirmed cause; Guy identified luminance computation as the problem.
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9to5Google reported that its Pixel 3 XL running Android 10 was affected, while its Pixel 4 XL running Android 11 was not. The outlet attributed the difference to Android 11 converting unsupported image color spaces to sRGB before processing. That is a report about those tested devices and versions, not a guarantee that every phone running Android 11 was immune.
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Android Authority reported at the time that Google and Samsung were testing fixes. The contemporaneous reports cited here do not establish a universal rollout date or a complete list of which devices received a fix.
What should you do if your phone is crashing?
Some users in the 2020 coverage reportedly escaped the loop by changing the wallpaper during a brief pause between crashes or deleting the image through recovery tools. Others reportedly needed a factory reset, which could erase data that had not been backed up. These were historical user reports, not a safe, universally applicable recovery procedure.
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Google’s current Pixel troubleshooting guidance for phones that restart or crash recommends checking for Android updates, using safe mode to investigate app-related problems, and contacting support if crashes continue. It is general Pixel guidance, not a specific remedy or confirmation of the status of this 2020 wallpaper bug on every manufacturer’s phone. For Pixel wallpaper settings, Google’s wallpaper customization instructions explain the current controls but do not discuss the incident.
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In this incident, yes—but the documented trigger was setting one particular image as wallpaper on some phones, where Android processed it in a way that caused a crash loop. The reporting does not show that simply receiving or viewing any picture can crash an Android phone, nor does it establish a general risk from photos. The event was reported in 2020; the available current Google guidance is general troubleshooting rather than a device-by-device historical postmortem.
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