Major iOS bug wreaks havoc on the iPhone

Feb 15, 2018 13:18 GMT  ·  By

UPDATE: Sending the character below to an iPhone can lead to serious damage. One of the iPhone 8 models we used for testing this bug no longer boots and restoring doesn't seem to help. We're now trying a full reset and update the article afterwards.

Additionally, it looks like the Apple Watch suffers from the same bug and is pushed into an infinite reboot loop after receiving the said symbol. Original article below.


Here’s another major bug that appears to wreak havoc on pretty much any iPhone running any iOS version except 11.3 
beta.

Sending someone using an iPhone a specific symbol in Indian dialect Telugu completely crashes the app to the point where it’s impossible to relaunch it without more complex tweaks. In some cases, the iPhone resprings following a Springboard crash, while during our test here at Softpedia one iPhone 8 rebooted unexpectedly and failed to boot without a hard reset.

As it turns out, iOS fails to read the character and instead triggers an app crash, regardless of the name of the app. We’ve tested this bug with WhatsApp, iMessage, Mail, and Facebook Messenger and all of them crash.

Discovered by Italian site Mobile World, the issue has already been flagged on Apple’s Open Radar bug reporting platform, and is said to be affecting macOS as well. Since it appears to be fixed in iOS 11.3, Apple is most likely aware of the problem and is likely to ship a fix with the next major OS update.

How to recover from a crash

As said, receiving this special character causes the app to crash without being able to relaunch it. This happens because of the way iOS is built, as trying to reopen the application always gets you where you left off. In this case, the conversation window with the faulty character that iOS can’t read. When this happens, however, iOS attempts to interpret the symbol once again, thus causing another crash, and basically pushing the device into an infinite crash loop.

What you need to do is to remove the conversation or clear the message that contains the bad character. In WhatsApp, you can do this from WhatsApp Web or using 3D Touch and opening another conversation (this latter option, however, doesn’t seem to be working for everyone). Also, you can reinstall WhatsApp and start from scratch, but this means that you’re going to lose all your messages unless a backup was created.

In some cases, if the same person that sent you the characters sends another message, access to the app might be restored. Additionally, the sender can use the function Delete message for everyone in WhatsApp to restore your app.

The same steps apply to iMessage and other messengers, while in the Mail app, it’s enough to simply remove the message that includes the character from a PC.

The faulty character that crashes the iPhone is available in the box below, but use it wisely because it can create serious damage on an impacted device.

Do not open the box below on an iPhone!

Use this character for testing purposes only!
జ్ఞ‌ా