Gaurav Agrawal, the guy behind the viral image that crashed Android phone, says it was unintentional

A few days ago a wallpaper image became viral, not for how beautiful or unique it was but for its hidden glitch that resulted in any Android handset to go in a continuous boot loop. Soon, Android users started posting about it on social media, talking about it and indeed making it popular. Now, the photographer has spoken up on how his image unintentionally brought this glitch with itself.

The photo was taken by scientist and amateur photographer Gaurav Agrawal and the image was taken at St Mary Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana, back in August 2019. Agrawal posted the particular photo on Flickr without knowing the effect it could have on several handsets.

In an interview with BBC, Agrawal said that "I didn't do anything intentionally. I'm sad that people ended up having issues." Talking more about the moment when this image was taken, he added that "It was gloomy and cloudy, and we thought there wasn't going to be a great sunset. We were about to leave when things started to change."

The image was taken by a Nikon camera and was later edited on Adobe Lightroom software.

And it must’ve been during the editing or exporting process when the colour mode could have changed to ProPhotoRGB format. Since the format is not supported by Android phones yet, they crashed when trying to open this image.

However, now Agrawal's Flickr post with this image now duly noted that "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." While Google is yet to give a statement, Samsung has started rolling out an update to fix this issue.