New wallpaper feature causes games to crash in Android 12
Google launched the Android 12 officially earlier last month, and although a lot of features got ironed out during the beta phase, quirks still remain. A major feature of the Android 12, the rotating wallpapers, is reportedly making gamers sight in frustration.
TL;DR
- Android 12 feature causes games to crash unexpectedly.
- Developers are unable to work around the problem.
- The only solution is for users to disable the feature before they start a game.
It is hard to be an early adopter. New releases in OS can cause quite a hassle for users who want to be at the spearpoint of technological innovation. Unfortunately, this lifestyle is especially incompatible with our favorite past-time, gaming.
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For those who are unaware, hardcore gamers strive for the ultimate performance in their games. A split second delay, a frame drop at the wrong moment or gods-forbid, a crash, can ruin the efforts of days in competitive games. Thus, it is a well known mantra for gamers to avoid switching to new platforms, because even small changes under the hood can lead to unpredictable predicaments.
This time the culprit seems to be Google, with their brand new Android 12 OS. One of the popular features of the operating system is reportedly causing games to crash and as of now, there seems to be no work-around.
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Before you go about throwing your new Pixel 6 in the recycle bin, let me explain more about the problem. The main issue seems to lie with the Material You integration of the "Monet" theme engine, a tool that is responsible for selecting shades from your background and applies them to other elements of your UI. One of the features, allows users to change wallpapers automatically in the background.
Basically, the crashes happen every time the wallpaper of your device changes in the background. The problem is quite obvious here: According to XDA Developers, that spotted and tested the issue, every time the wallpaper changed in the background it would cause games like Genshin Impact and Minecraft to crash.
The easiest solution is opting-out of the feature before you open your games, but this is another concession gamers have to make to enjoy their favorite games uninterrupted. Unfortunately, this is also a problem without any obvious solutions, since Google forbids developers from disabling the feature that causes the underlying issue.
At this point we are not aware of this bug causing issues on other performance demanding applications.
Source: XDA Developers
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