From Samsung to Huawei, Android smartphones are some of the most popular handheld devices around the world.
But if you have an Android smartphone, you may want to be careful about which photos you look at on your phone.
A simple photo of a sunset over a lake is doing the rounds of social media, that appears to crash Android smartphones when used as a wallpaper.
The issue was first flagged on Twitter by Ice Universe, whose tweet has now been retweeted over 16,000 times.
They wrote: “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.”
If you set the photo as a wallpaper on an Android smartphone, a bug makes the screen turn on and off continuously.
And in some cases, users are forced to do a factory reset on their smartphone to fix the issue.
The issue appears to affect smartphones running on Android 10 – the latest version of the Android operating system.
While the reason for the issue remains unclear, some experts suggest the the image crashes some smartphones because they don’t know how to deal with certain colours within it.
Speaking to the BBC, Ken Munro and Dave Lodge from Pen Test partners, said: “As digital photographs have improved in quality, phones need to check what the image ‘colour space’ is to work out how to display it properly.
“It’s how a phone knows how to display exactly the right shade of green, for example.
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“There are different ways of defining the colour space. Some spaces have specialist uses in graphic design, so sometimes you’ll see images that aren’t in the usual ‘Standard RGB’ format. It’s also possible to deliberately create images that have more colour information than some devices can handle.
“What’s happened here is that the way some phones deal with these cases has gone wrong.
“The phone crashes because it doesn’t know how to deal with it correctly, and the software developers probably hadn’t considered this might happen.”
If you receive the photo, we would recommend deleting it straight away, and not even attempting to open it on your smartphone.
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