Apple fans beware; findings have reported that a single text can crash your iPhone. It’s not a particular word, an image, or an emoji, even — all it takes is a string of seeming Arabic characters sent on SMS for the phone to crash and send itself into a loop.
Panicking? While it does seem quite alarming, we recommend you read on. If you’re an iPhone user, best to prepare yourself for this sort of situation.
It all started when a group of keen Reddit users noticed that if you sent a specific thread of Arabic characters through an iMessage, the phone’s system would crash and restart. Once they booted up iMessage again, however, the phone would become unresponsive, crash and restart again — the stuff of an Apple user’s worst nightmare.
All hope is not lost, however — this particularly annoying bug is still fixable, and does not incur any lasting damage to the phone’s system.
MacRumors offers two methods of getting yourself out of the endless loop of crash-and-restart:
- If you were looking at the conversation when your phone crashed, replying in to the conversation will prevent it from crashing.
- If you weren’t looking directly at the conversation, the phone will still indeed crash, and you’ll have to wait for it to restart before you can take action. Once it does finish restarting, however, you can send yourself a text message to put an end to the loop.
How do you exactly send yourself a message when the Messenger app is kaput? Here’s where Siri comes to the rescue — just tell Siri to “send myself a message”, and that should do it.
Redditor sickestdancer98 has done some investigating on their own, and says the bug is tied with the notifications api:
We found out what it is. it is due to how the banner notifications process the Unicode text. The banner briefly attempts to present the incoming text and then “gives up” thus the crash.
Twitter user @iGadgets__ has spoken with Apple about this bug. Apple is currently aware of it are taking action to fix it.
@MacRumors @julipuli Hello, I chatted with apple support earlier today about this and they said there Senior Engineers know about this.(1/2)
— Apple News (@iGadgets__) May 27, 2015
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