Special Indian character crashes Messages and WhatsApp on iOS and macOS

A bug allows a special Indian character character to crash Messages on both iOS 11 and macOS. The bug also affects watchOS and some third-party communication apps such as WhatsApp.

The bug crashes at least Messages, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Outlook for iOS, and Gmail upon receipt of the character, according to The Verge, who reproduced the issue on iOS 11.2.5. It didn’t work with Telegram and Skype. Mobile World previously wrote about the problem and that Italian site reports that Safari and Messages on macOS are also affected.

It is a character of the Indian Telugu language, which is spoken in one state of the country. Receiving in a message and pasting it into a text box causes a crash, but a notification can crash the home screen and a restart threatens a bootloop, according to Mobile World.

The bug appeared at OpenRadar on Monday and it is reported that watchOS is also involved and that Apple is aware of the problem and has fixed it in an upcoming update. According to The Verge, it does indeed not work with the public beta of iOS 11.3. It is expected to be released in March.

The apps keep crashing as long as they try to load the character in question so the user has to figure out a way to delete the message containing the character. Apple software has previously suffered from bugs that caused crashes. At the beginning of this year, there was the chaiOS bug that caused iOS to crash via a link.