According to developer Davide Bianco, the problem is caused by a lack of support for non-sRGB images in the Android SystemUI itself. This is why you can view the image just fine in-browser, but setting it as a wallpaper will temporarily brick your phone. When SystemUI attempts to map color values, the values in the image above exceed the array size and crash the phone.
In theory, these sorts of images can be used as a booby-trap. Send someone a gorgeous wallpaper, they install it, and boom — their device is now boot-looped. Android 11 will fix the problem by supporting non-SRGB wallpapers without this kind of problem.
Weirdly, not every single Android device is vulnerable to this problem. A Huawei Mate 20 Pro didn’t crash when tested by 9to5Google and OnePlus devices are also rumored to be immune. Products from Samsung, on the other hand, very much aren’t. It’s possible that the specific restrictions or software changes on the Huawei and OnePlus devices allow them to handle this kind of content differently.
Either way, best not to source wallpaper from random people until this problem is resolved, unless you’ve recently backed your phone up. Apple, of course, has had similar problems — on two separate occasions, sending the wrong character to an iPhone has been demonstrated to cause it to crash.
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