According to the BBC, using a wide-gamut image as "wallpaper" on some Android-based cellphones can cause them to go into a sort of digital fibrillation:
Gaurav Agrawal . . . shared [a photograph he took last summer] on photo platform Flickr and thought no more about it. However, a glitch meant that when the image was set as wallpaper, it caused some Android phones to fail. The handsets would switch on and off repeatedly, requiring a factory reset which meant all data on them was wiped.
Agrawal provided this explanation
on his Flickr page for the image:
***** This photograph is in the news lately with android phones crashing when setting this as a wallpaper. Some website is hosting this photo of mine and is the source of most downloads. Nothing is wrong this photo but I gathered that it was exported from LR in ProPhotoRGB format with is not compatible with android phone for some reason. If you use this photo in a blog, do tag it with the link to this webpage and give photocredits accordingly ****
Obviously, the technical nexus between the color space of the wallpaper and the peculiar behavior of the cellphones is not really clear in either the Beeb's report or Agrawal's explanation. I'm partial to Apple mobile devices myself, so maybe Android phones just aren't that smart. (Perhaps that's the reason some people refer to sRGB as "stupid" RGB.) Or maybe it's just an instance of vigilante photographic justice for websites that fail to include proper image credits.
Andrew Rodney and other experts have been warning us for years about the perils of ignoring proper color-management technique, but I bet none of them ever anticipated this.
