An image of a tranquil lake is wreaking havoc on Android phones. This has effectively forced users to reset their smartphones.

The issue was pointed out by leaker Ice Universe, who noted that some Android phones may continually turn the display on and off if a simple image is set as the wallpaper. Once in this loop, there is no way to get out of it, even if the phone is rebooted. So whatever you do, do not download and use images on your phone.

Once an Android phone gets into a crash loop, the only way to get out of this soft brick state is to reset the phone.

Not all phones are affected; OnePlus and Huawei devices seem to be exempt, while Samsung Galaxy devices seem to be particularly prone to crash-causing images.

It is not clear exactly what is causing these images to crash Android phones. However, Ice Universe believes it has something to do with how the color space of the image is set and how its color profile reacts with the Skia graphics engine used by Android. In effect, the metadata behind the image may be causing problems with Android.

Ice Universe tweeted that when the image was uploaded to Weibo, the service changed the colors slightly, apparently preventing the image from crashing when used as wallpaper. 9to5Google investigated further and found that this issue was caused by the color Android wanted to display space that Android wants to display.

Android phones tend to prefer the sRGB color space, but this image uses the RGB color space, which Android 10 does not do well; in Android 11, the color space is converted to sRGB, so such crashes are not an issue.

There is no information about where this image came from, and people avoid posting links to it to reduce the spread of harmful images. However, if you see this image or someone sends it to you, we strongly recommend that you avoid it. If you have already been involved in this image problem, you will need to reset your phone to factory settings.