Watch out: This serene wallpaper crashes Android devices

This image, now edited and cropped, originally had an improperly coded colour profile, which crashed Android devices when installed as a wallpaper. — Twitter/@UniverseIce

A serene sunset over a lake might not seem like the most sinister image, though one such image is causing Android phones to crash when set as wallpaper.

Twitter user Ice Universe discovered the bug, warning that the image was being shared widely on the microblogging service, and added that editing the image appeared to resolve the issue.

Unfortunately, many Twitter users instead experimented with the image to see what was causing the issue and instead ended up bricking their phone.

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. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31,2020

Android Central explained that the so-called “cursed image” was caused by an improperly coded colour profile, which when set as a wallpaper crashes the phone’s Android System User Interface.

Those who’ve crashed their phones can fix it by either booting their phone into safe mode and changing the wallpaper, or using a custom recovery app to access the phone’s data and purge the wallpaper data.

If both solutions are not accessible, users could factory reset their phone.

Recently, a string of specific characters was found to cause iOS devices to crash if received via text, either through Messages, Mail or other apps

A similar bug hit iOS devices in 2018, using an Indian language character, in Telugu, that crashed the device and rendered messaging apps which displayed said characters inaccessible.

This latest image glitch however appears to affect only Android devices, with Android Central reporting that it hit multiple brands of devices and even Android emulators.