Apple announced last month that the upcoming Apple iOS 11.3 update will offer features that gives users power to control their batteries, Augmented Reality (AR) upgrade and Animoji.
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The bug is triggered by sending an Indian language (Telugu) character to devices, which first causes Apple’s iOS Springboard – the standard application that manages the iOS home screen – to crash after the message has been received.
The bug also cuts off access to other popular apps such as WhatsApp, Outlook for iOS, Gmail and Facebook Messenger.
At this point, it’s hard to say how many apps are affected by the bug, but some notable ones that aren’t include Slack, Telegram and Skype.
You can see the risky letter in the tweet below. The problems start after a user receives a message containing a specific Unicode symbol from Telugu, a language spoken by more than 74 million people in central India.
Early European explorers said Telugu sounded like Italian because numerous words end with vowels.
Apple’s products have been plagued by so-called text bombs, which can crash and freeze devices through malicious messages.
Indeed, attempts to reload Messages after the rogue character had been received saw it get stuck trying – and failing – to bring that message in.
When Apple rolled out its latest iOS 11 update to the public, it had numerous bugs that needed to be fixed.
“The character in question can cause serious problems and, in nearly all our tests, after the Springboard crash the iPhone went into bootloop and we had to perform a reset from DFU [Device Firmware Upgrade] mode”, the site reported.
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The symbol that is responsible for this is actually two Telugu characters that when translated mean the word “sign”. Apps on the Apple Watch and Mac are also hit. Still, it’s a good reminder that even the best tech companies can’t think of everything, and there will be plenty of fixes in the future. And in January, a “chaiOS” bug emerged that caused some devices to crash and reboot after users clicked a certain link. It doesn’t appear to affect us in iOS 11.3 beta 2.
