It’s pretty rare for anyone’s phone to become completely bricked outside of hardware failures. Tinkering around with ROMs and third-party hacks can certainly do the trick, but besides those things it’s just not something that you’d have to worry about.
But apparently something’s happened with a particular wallpaper floating around the internet that can cause your phone to become soft-bricked, and it’s particularly effective against Samsung phones. Be careful out there.
Bricked Android wallpaper
This flaw was noted by Ice Universe on Twitter. It’s a pretty innocuous looking image, but when set as your wallpaper it will repeatedly crash the phone with no to unlock it and change your wallpaper back.
The image above is the questionable wallpaper, but the exact reason for the crash isn’t immediately obvious. Ice Universe seems to think it could have something to do with the color gamut of the photo, since uploading it to Weibo changed the colors slightly and stopped the crashing. Uploading it to Twitter, however, didn’t solve the issue, so don’t test it on your personal device.
It’s apparently mostly affecting Samsung phones, but another user on Twitter noted it crashed his Pixel phone as well. If you’re accidentally caught with a broken phone due to this wallpaper, you can try booting into safe mode and changing the wallpaper from there, or doing a complete factory reset from the recovery mode on your phone.
Generally, though, you’re going to want to avoid this one.
