Potentially frustrating news for iPhone users came out today in the form of a Reddit post, and later a video showing a bug in the Messages app that has been causing all kinds of problems. If an iPhone user receives a message with a certain string of unicode and Arabic characters, the Messages app will crash, and according to 9to5Mac, some users have reported their iPhone respringing or rebooting.
This isn’t the first time that a text string bug like this has affected smartphones, and it likely won’t be the last. However, in the past, Apple and others have been on the ball in pushing a quick patch to users, and Apple is already saying it is working on a fix. Apparently the root cause of the bug has to do with the parsing of unicode and Arabic characters in notifications, and when the phone cannot properly display the message, the app or entire operating system will crash.
If you’ve received this test, there are a couple of things you can do. Receiving another text message from the sender will apparently restore your phone to normal working order, and replying to the message from another device, like a Mac, will also fix the problem. For the time being, you may just have to hope your friends don’t think this kind of prank is funny. Apple is usually pretty quick with emergency patches like this, but with WWDC coming up in under two weeks, its engineers will be stretched pretty thin.
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