A New iPhone Bug Is Crashing Messaging Apps

Apple users who just got over the last round of obnoxious iOS glitches now have a new bug to worry about. As The Verge reports, receiving a text to your iPhone that contains one specific character can crash and disable your apps.

All phones running on iOS 11 could be vulnerable to the issue. To trigger the bug, all someone has to do is send you a message that has a certain character in the Indian language Telugu. The character will crash iMessage and possibly crash the entire iOS Springboard (the app that manages the iPhone home screen).

The same problem apparently occurs whether the character is received on third party messaging and email apps like Gmail, WhatsApp, Outlook, and Facebook Messenger. The character disables whatever app you're using, and the only way to fix the bug is to get back into the app and delete the message it came in. Of course, this becomes a problem when the app crashes every time you try to open it. One way around this is to ask a friend to send a new message to the effected app so you can access it by way of the notification.

This isn’t the first time iOS 11 has had trouble processing characters in messaging apps. In late 2017, many users found themselves unable to type the capital letter “I”, but instead of crashing the entire app the operating system replaced the text with the character “[?]”.

The glitch hasn’t been showing up in iOS 11.3, which Apple plans to release to the public this spring. Until that new update rolls out, tell your friends to refrain from sending you messages with the character below.