Android 12 Crashes Games

The latest Android 12 crashes games while you play them after updating your phone to the latest OS. And the problem with this may lie with the automatic changing wallpapers feature. The wallpaper-based themes, dubbed Material You might have the underlying bug.

The automatic theming engine creates problems. Changing your wallpaper will automatically restart your apps’ activities, as it’s possible that they need to change colors. As noted by XDA, that behavior can lead to drastic problems when you combine automatically changing wallpapers and gaming sessions.

Android 12 Crashes Games

An entry in the Google Issue Tracker describes how games like Pokémon Go or Wild Rift crash after changing the wallpaper. And it’s likely that significantly more titles are affected, with XDA reporting that the issue arises for Genshin Impact, Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG Mobile, and Minecraft, too.

These crashes also occur when you exit games. Or change your home screen wallpaper. And then want to continue your session, though those who use apps that periodically switch out their wallpapers automatically will probably run into the issue more often than others.

In the Google Issue Tracker. A user explained that changing wallpapers on Android 12 results in a configuration change. This forces app activities to be restarted. This is meant to ensure that apps that hook into the wallpaper’s Material You theme will show up in their new colors.

By default, this configuration change affects all apps. Including those that will probably never use Material You colors. Usually, game developers already opt out of configuration changes not affecting their projects. Such as dark mode, screen rotation, and locale changes.

But it looks like developers now need to opt-out of the wallpaper configuration changes as well. Let us know if you have experienced any game crashes since updating to windows 12 by commenting below.

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