This Character Can Crash Almost All Apps on Apple Devices

A new bug in Apple devices has been discovered. Engineers at Aloha Browser discovered a new character from Telugu, a regional Indian language, that can crash iOS, macOS, tvOS, etc.

This means, if you receive a message, a notification, or an app that includes the character, the app will likely crash on your device, reports The Verge. The bug seems to be fixed on the latest iOS 11.3 developer beta already, though it’s affecting the latest, public version of iOS which is what the majority of iPhone users are currently using. On the Mac front, as you can see above, entering the character within apps will completely crash them and require you to restart them. The character interestingly doesn’t crash all apps, however. Notably, I couldn’t get it to crash Chromium-based Electron apps, and it mostly seems to be perfectly functional with native Mac apps instead.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Apple is reportedly aware of the bug already, and a fix will likely follow later today or sometime tomorrow. This isn’t the first time a bug like this has been discovered on Apple’s software — in fact, we have a new “iPhone-crashing bug” almost every year. The latest incident is business as usual.

Either way, Apple has been under a lot of fire lately because of the buggy iOS 11 updates. The company is believed to be focusing on stability and reliability with this year’s iOS 12 release, though I personally wouldn’t be too surprised if another iPhone crashing bug shows up next year.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 11 comments

  • dontbe evil

    15 February, 2018 - 12:19 pm

    <p>buahauahuahuahuahaauahu</p>

    • arunphilip

      15 February, 2018 - 12:38 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#246009"><em>In reply to dontbe_evil:</em></a></blockquote><p>Gotta love that laugh in combination with your name! </p>

  • dcdevito

    15 February, 2018 - 1:05 pm

    <p>"It just works"</p>

  • Thomas Parkison

    15 February, 2018 - 1:10 pm

    <p>Has Apple heard of the TRY-CATCH-FINALLY construct?</p>

  • aubreyfreemaniii

    15 February, 2018 - 1:21 pm

    <p>So one symbol in a language that has 60 symbols total, which is spoken by 74 million people, in a country of 1.324 billion people, where about 3% of the mobile market is iOS…this is such a huge problem, I'm shocked that my phone hasn't crashed yet. </p><p><br></p>

  • IanYates82

    Premium Member
    15 February, 2018 - 4:00 pm

    <p>The font handling code at Apple seems to be incredibly brittle. Every 18 months or so there's some magic character that can crash apps. Surely the fix this time shouldn't be to whack the mole, but to add some graceful fall back to a question mark character like us devs often see when we incorrectly parse some bytes using the wrong text encoding (UTF 16 little vs big endian for example) </p>

    • Mehedi Hassan

      Premium Member
      16 February, 2018 - 7:09 am

      <blockquote><a href="#246073"><em>In reply to IanYates82:</em></a></blockquote><p><br></p><p>To be honest their font rendering is spot on, that's something Microsoft still can't figure out </p>

    • johnbaxter

      17 February, 2018 - 5:53 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#246073"><em>In reply to IanYates82:</em></a></blockquote><p>Unicode is hard.</p>

  • rosyna

    15 February, 2018 - 7:53 pm

    <p>It’s not a “character”, it’s what’s known as a “grapheme cluster”.</p>

  • NT6.1

    16 February, 2018 - 9:10 am

    <p>Ouch. Apple is really declining in quality.</p>

  • GT Tecolotecreek

    16 February, 2018 - 11:00 am

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I'm blacklisting all my friends who write me in Telugu. </span></p><p>Thurrot.com is really declining in quality, pure click bait headline. </p><p><br></p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC