Are your games crashing on Android 12? Blame Material You
Along with the various software optimizations, the biggest change to Android 12 has to be the integration of the Material You Dynamic Theming system. This creates unique themes based on the wallpaper that you are using, with various aspects of the UI being changed to match. You can even opt into using dynamically themed icons that will also pull from the color palette of your wallpaper.
However, for as awesome as Material You is with Android 12, it seems that there’s a pretty frustrating bug that has reared its ugly head. As noted in a bug report on the Google Issue Tracker (via XDA Developers), one user states that when playing either League of Legends: Wild Rift or Pokémon Go, the games will crash if the home screen wallpaper is changed. The issue is limited to the home screen wallpaper, as the apps won’t crash if you change up the lock screen wallpaper.
While this may seem like an odd time to change your wallpaper, it’s not like this individual is pausing the game, making the changes, and then coming back. Instead, this applies more to those who are using live wallpaper apps like KLWP, Cartogram, or SwirlWalls.
Because the wallpaper automatically changes in the background, sometimes resulting in a different color palette being available, this ends up crashing the games. As noted in a response to the bug report, the information has been shared with the product and engineering teams. So hopefully a bug fix arrives sooner rather than later, but until then, your options are kind of limited.
The first way to avoid this bug is to simply change your home screen to use a static wallpaper. Another option, if you’re set on using a live wallpaper, is to change the frequency at which the wallpaper updates. Changing to a longer frequency should cut down and maybe even eliminate the game crashes that you might experience.