Yes, if you apply this wallpaper it’ll kill your apple or android device in minutes

Image copyright: GAURAV AGRAWAL
ISO-31
Focal Length 32mm
Edited in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Date taken: August 24, 2019 at 6:37 PM

Below is the link to the original image:
https://hdqwalls.com/sunset-at-st-mary-lake-glacier-national-park-5k-wallpaper

So, what is this all about? This wallpaper is circulated all over the internet and social media. There are lots of people who applied this wallpaper and lost their phone to a free wallpaper.

The wallpaper circulated around is not the original picture. This sunset picture was taken by Gaurav Agarwal at St Mary Lake Glacier National Park with Nikon D850. But the image is not intended to damage any device, then how is this image killing phones.

To understand how this picture is killing the phone we need to learn about the color spaces used by various devices. There are 3 widely used color spaces as under:

1. sRGB
2. Adobe RGB
3. ProPhoto RGB

The above color spaces can be defined in the visual color space in the representation below:

All the smartphones and other gadgets are designed to understand sRGB color space to maintain consistency in the color projection. So what happens when you open an image which is in any other color space except sRGB. Our smartphone will process that image and convert it into sRGB to display the image.

This image is originally taken in sRGB as it was taken in a Nikon camera but then it was edited in Adobe Lightroom and moved to ProPhoto RGB which gave photo its vibrant colors. So when you set this image as your wallpaper, your phone converts the image into the sRGB and this is where the trouble is happening. It’s kind of a loop virus which doesn’t let the photo get converted completely to sRGB due to a single pixel in the image. This single pixel in the image has a different kind of luminance where the mobile software struggles to convert the pixel into sRGB which starts a loop of the same function. Here your mobile software continuously tries to convert that one pixel and in addition to that this image is selected as your wallpaper.

A processor can only handle one process at a time, it can multitask by providing equal time to all the other processes. Here as this image is selected as your wallpaper it don’t let the processor skip the process which creates a loop of this process and eventually kills your smartphone.

Photo nicknamed Cursed Wallpaper

This issue is nicely explained with MrWhoesTheBoss in the below youtube video: