In 2015, there was a lot of fuss about a bug called Effective Power which is a series of characters that can cause iOS to crash. Now, we have something similar but it is only one character and it’s causing different iOS messaging apps to shut down. The character is in the Telugu language, a Central-Southern Dravidian language spoken in India by about 70 million people. When this character is received or pasted into a text field, it leads to a freeze of apps or a complete crash of the entire operating system. iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Outlook have all crashed when this symbol is used.
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When this symbol doesn’t crash the system, the messaging app continues to close each time you try to start it. The situation gets worse if someone sends you the symbol and iOS tries to show it in a notification. In this case, the entire Springboard (ie the system software that manages the Home) will be blocked. When this happens, do not force a reboot of the device, if not it will bootloop. Just wait and hope that the springboard will restart properly.
This bug does not only affect iOS, it affects all Apple products including watchOS and macOS. However, it seems that this bug does not affect the beta of iOS 11.3 which is a good signal. This bug was first reported three days ago and it can cause serious harm to devices thus do not test this character with your device or send it contacts. In most of the tests conducted by
mobileworld, the Springboard crashed and the
iPhone went into bootloop. It took a reset from DFU mode to revive the phone.
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