Android 12 annoys gamers: You should avoid this mistake

Side effect with consequences: Ironically, the most important innovation in Android 12 is now causing a lot of frustration among gamers. There is only one way to protect smartphone owners.

With Android 12, Google has released the biggest update in recent years. The most obvious and probably also the most important innovation is the “Material You” design language, which is intended to make the smartphone more personal and, for example, automatically adapts system colors to the wallpaper. However, it is precisely this feature that causes problems that affect gamers in particular.

Android 12 ends games when changing wallpapers

If such a wallpaper change takes place, all games running in the background are forcibly closed (Source: XDA). This was tested on a Pixel 6 Pro on several Android games such as Genshin Impact, Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG Mobile or Minecraft. All of the Android games mentioned were forcibly closed after the wallpaper changed.

Normal Android apps, according to XDA, are largely unaffected by this behavior. That Problem mainly affects games.

Of course, in everyday life it should rarely happen that you play a game, then switch to the home screen and change the background image and then return to the game. But if you use apps that let the wallpaper change automatically, you could experience a nasty surprise and then, in extreme cases, lose your game progress. Google’s in-house wallpaper app “Backgrounds”, for example, offers such an option, as do others.

We explain which new features are still available in Android 12 in Video:

This is how you protect yourselves

There is currently no real solution to the problem. To be on the safe side, it is advisable to to refrain from changing wallpapers during a game and to prevent the automatic changing of background images. It is not yet known if and when Google will solve the problem.