New iOS Bug Can Crash iPhones, Render iMessages and Apps Inaccessible

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Friday, February 16, 2018

The new iOS brought with it a host of bugs for users, with the worst of it hitting iPhone and iPad owners late last year. This year looks to be more of the same, though, as Apple's mobile software has a newly discovered bug that can crash an iPhone and render a few important apps inaccessible.

This particularly nasty bug was first reported by Italian blog Mobile World, and as confirmed via The Verge, this bad piece of iOS coding will crash an iPhone and render the iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Outlook for iOS unusable. Gmail and perhaps more messaging apps look to be affected as well, as confirmed on iPhones running iOS 11.2.5.

It's already bad enough that Variety is also covering this latest mishap from the Apple iOS team. In some cases, the error sends iPhones into an endless reboot cycle, and all it takes is for an owner to open a message containing one specific character.

This looks similar to the letter "i" fiasco that was a major spot on this iOS version's already shaky credibility. Apple has responded just recently that it is now working on a fix for the bug for iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4 and tvOS 11, confirming that the bug will cripple not just Apple smartphones, but almost all of the company's other products as well.

"The character in question can cause serious problems and, in almost 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 report from Mobile World said, referring to a specific character in the Telugu language from India.

Meanwhile, Apple has confirmed that the bug has been fixed in the beta versions of iOS, tvOS, watchOS and macOS, according to iMore.