Photographer Gaurav Agrawal was surprised when he learned from the news that his amazing photo of Saint Mary Lake that he took last summer at the National Park in Montana can destroy countless Android smartphones.
If users set the image as a background on smartphones running the Android 10 operating system, the phones will start to work and stop frequently, which requires a factory reset option, which means that all data on it will be erased.
Agrawal told the BBC website ” I didn’t do anything on purpose … I am sad because people suffered because of the picture”.
It looks like the image, which was modified in Adobe Lightroom (Adobe Lightroom) and uploaded to the Flickr platform (Flickr) for photos, does not cause any problems on iPhones. But due to a small error while exporting the image, this beautiful image has become devastating to some brands of phones running Android OS 10.
Color spaces
The picture was taken with Nikon’s camera, then the photographer made a small adjustment using the Adobe Lightroom editing program that provides three color options to download the final result, and it appears that this option is the one that causes a bug in some Android phones.
Agrawal choose to download the image in RGB format, (RGB) It is the color model that Android 10 phones couldn’t handle, Dylan Russell, an Android developer, explained that this color space may not be supported on certain devices, and said, “It’s the way the phone knows how to display a perfectly appropriate shade of green, for example.”
“What happened here is that the way some phones deal with these cases is different, the phone might hang because it doesn’t know how to handle it properly, and developers might not have thought about this happening,” Russell added”ز
The photographer, who has more than 10,000 followers on the Flickr photography platform, and who previously published his work in the National Geographic magazine, says he was not aware of the bug because he had never tried it, and he added, “I didn’t know the formula would do that … I have an iPhone, and the background of my phone is always my wife’s photo”.