Apple

There’s a new iOS text bug going around that can crash your iPhone

Another one.

by
Joe Rice-Jones
April 24, 2020

ios apple iphone showing apps and wifi connection technology

Image: Unsplash

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There’s a new iOS text bug going around that can crash your iPhone. Just like the last big bug two years ago, this one also involves a string of several characters from a different language (Sindhi in this case) that makes iOS lock up and crash the iPhone it’s running on.

The character string that causes the lockups has been circulating on Discord servers and on Telegram over the last week, so be careful out there. It will crash iOS 13.4.1, the latest public version of iOS.

At least the bug isn’t as dangerous as the last one. The iOS Springboard will recover after around a minute if it does crash due to this, or you can force reboot the iPhone to get it back in a working state. Apparently the best way to protect yourself is to disable notifications from messaging apps until Apple rushes out a fix, as the flaw looks to affect how iOS handles notifications in apps.

https://twitter.com/EveryApplePro/status/1253432816177537024

Apple seems to be testing a fix in iOS 13.4.5 beta, as noted by 9to5Mac. Hopefully, it won’t be long before that beta becomes public.

This is hardly the first time that iOS has suffered showstopping bugs like this. Way back in 2015 there was a tiny string of text that disabled iMessage, a combination of emoji crashed things a few years ago, a simple link did the same in 2018, and 2016 had a five-second video that had a similar effect.

What do you think? Surprised that iOS has yet another almost-random issue like this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.