We find a nice photo online and decide to use it as a background for our mobile phone.Normal behavior, implemented a thousand times, but which in certain cases leads to the blockade of our Android smartphone.
It is not a virus or a malware, but a behavior of the Google operating system when he finds himself interpreting some particular characteristics of a photo.Specifically, the problem concerns the color profile.If the photo presents a Google Skia color profile, Android 10 goes into bulk in an attempt to convert it to an SRGB color profile, the one it commonly uses.It should be noted that the Beta versions of Android 11 manage this conversion process differently, and therefore are not afflicted by the problem.
As we can see in the video, select, as a background, a photo with Google Skia color profile leads to a continuous blocking and unlocking cycle of the device, without the user being able to intervene to resume control of the smartphone.
The only solutions, in fact, are the restart in safe mode to delete the offending photo or the most drastic solution to restart the smartphone in recovery mode and start a restoration to the factory data, a solution that, however, also deletes personal data.
Android's anomalous behavior was noticed in particular with a photo of a landscape, the one at the opening, but the possibility of creating photos with Google Skia color profile could lead to an amplification of this phenomenon.The easiest solution to remedy this problem is to open the photo with an editor, on PC or smartphone, save it and then select it as a background.In this way the editor will convert the photo to the color profile in use on the smartphone, avoiding any problem.The suggestions to download images only from reliable sites or applications, and to be wary of images sent by email or via social media.