14 DAY TRIAL // UPDATE: Learn here how to protect against the iPhone text bomb until a patch is released. Original story below.
It’s happening again, and honestly, it's becoming a little frustrating. A new text bomb bug has been discovered in iOS, causing any iPhone and iPad to crash with just a message that includes a specific set of characters.
Text bombs are nothing new for the iOS ecosystem, as such bugs are discovered every once in a while, technically causing devices to stop responding, freeze, or crash completely up to a point where only a forced restart restors it. And of course, once these devices are back to iOS, receiving the same messages could crash them again, essentially pushing them into an infinite reboot loop that can’t be stopped without a full fix or quick workarounds.
In this case, the text bomb comes down to a combination of the Italian flag emoji and a Sindhi language character, and the bug seems to affect all iOS and iPadOS 13 devices.
Fix available in latest iOS beta
The glitch causes devices to crash when an incoming notification with the said characters is received, and by the looks of things, pretty much any app where these symbols are rendered could be affected. These involve iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and even mail apps where previews are generated.
Once the bug occurs, the only way to recover is to force a device restart, it seems.
Luckily, there are two workarounds right now. One of them is to disable message notifications completely in all apps that could be exposed to the bug, including the ones mentioned above. And then, you can disable message previews, thus making sure that the notification doesn’t try to render the said characters.
By the looks of things, the last beta build of iOS has already corrected the problem, so there’s a chance a full fix is coming to us with the next stable update for the operating system.
The craziest iOS crash text bug đź’€ pic.twitter.com/29LJPb67WP — EverythingApplePro (@EveryApplePro) April 23, 2020