iOS bug is causing text messages to crash your iPhone

An unusual bug in Apple’s iOS can crash and reboot your iPhone if you receive a certain text message. The bug works as follows: Someone texts you a message with a specific string of Arabic characters. If your iPhone is locked, and you receive a notification of the new text, iMessage crashes and your iPhone proceeds to reboot.

iOS bugs are nothing new. Since its release last September, iOS 8 has been plagued by glitches that have forced Apple to continually issue updates to resolve certain issues. This latest bug is much more random and rare than others, so it’s not something that would affect a wide audience. Thankfully it’s one that users can resolve themselves without waiting for Apple to issue a fix.

What is the cause behind this newly discovered bug? It’s not the Arabic characters in and of itself but the way iOS tries to handle the full text, as described by AppleInsider. The Unicode characters that attempt to render and display the string take up too many resources when your phone is locked and the notification of the message appears.

The people at AppleInsider sent the same text string during a normal iMessage conversation, and the iPhone did not crash or reboot. That test suggests the glitch lies more within iOS’s notifications process and not within the iMessage app.

Several iOS users have chimed in on social media sites to report the problem but it’s not one likely to affect most people. First you would need to be texted that specific string of characters while your iPhone is locked. That means you are not going to receive it accidentally or rather from someone who knows your mobile number and is purposely trying to crash your iPhone for some reason. The text itself also has to come from another iPhone.

What if you do run into this particular bug? There are a few ways around it.

You can always turn off notifications for text messages, but that’s hardly an ideal solution. Instead, you can simply trigger another text message. You can ask the person who sent you the original message to send a new one, assuming that person didn’t send it maliciously. Otherwise, you can send yourself a text message easily enough by telling Siri to do it or using an iOS app that lets you share content via iMessage. The new text message essentially cancels out the old one on the notifications screen.

 

Apple apparently is aware of the problem. A Twitter user who claimed to have chatted with Apple support said that Apple senior engineers know about the bug. If so, then Apple is likely to have a resolution available in the next update to iOS. Developers are currently beta testing iOS 8.4, so Apple may have time to squeeze in a fix before it rolls that latest update.