Nasty Apple iOS Bug Causes Reboots And App Crashes, But There Is A Fix

A new iOS bug has emerged recently that allows iPhone users to crash another person’s iPhone by simply sending a text message. The text message causes the victim’s iPhone to continuously crash if the text is received while in lock screen mode. The bug also causes the iPhone to reboot without notice. The crash appears to take place only if there is iPhone to iPhone communication, according to 9to5Mac.

A string of specific Arabic characters used in the text message causes the crash. If you have received the text message that causes the crash, then you have been targeted as part of a prank. The bug does not happen by accident since the character strand is a very specific set of Unicode characters. Below is a screenshot from a Reddit discussion bringing up the issue:

 Reddit discussion about iOS bug that causes Messages App crashes / Credit: Reddit

A bug identical to this issue also plagued iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 in August 2013. The bug was due to Apple’s CoreText rendering engine in iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 causing an app that tries to render a string of Arabic characters to crash. Apple’s engineers ended up patching that Unicode bug through its iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 software update.

Many victims of the new Unicode bug went on Twitter to vent about the issue. Here is what some of the victims wrote:

If one more person sends me that stupid turn off your iPhone text I'm gonna be so mad

— Sarah Margo (@sarahcmargo) May 27, 2015

Did my iPhone really just turnoff Bc of that text..

— Jovanni️⭐️ (@C_J_P_16) May 27, 2015

Someone sent that message that makes your iPhone turn off to make me text back.. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my phone 😑

— k e. (@BlissfulAllure) May 27, 2015

A user on Reddit wrote that this bug is also likely caused by the way iOS handles Unicode. The Unicode string — which includes Arabic characters — cannot be fully rendered in Notifications. When the text string is displayed in the lock screen or as a drop-down notification, iOS attempts to pull resources to render the messages — thus causing Springboard to crash. However, the same line of code does not cause any issues when it is sent as part of a normal Messages conversation reports AppleInsider.

How To Fix The Bug

My guess is that Apple is aware about this issue and should have a fix in place when iOS 9 releases this fall. Fortunately, there are several ways to fix the bug now. Essentially the initial strand has to be cancelled out so I recommend that you have the person who pranked you send another message. You can also send yourself a message through Siri or your Mac. To send yourself a text message using Siri, simply tell the digital assistant “send a message to myself” followed by a quick message like “hello.” Another option is to text yourself a picture from within the Photos app. Lastly, it is worth trying to send yourself a text using Share Sheets to stop the iPhone from crashing.

Have you been victimized by this Unicode bug? What was your experience like? Let us know in the comments section! This article will be updated as I find out more about the bug and how to fix it.
 
 Originnaly Published by Amit Chowdhry