From 9to5mac:
A newly found bug surrounding iOS and Messages has emerged this evening that causes the app to continuously crash when a certain text is received. If the text is received while the phone is on the lock screen, it also causes your iPhone to reboot without any notice or explanation.
And:
Since the characters strand is so specific, most people should never accidentally experience the crashing. Anyone who does experience the crashing was likely singled out on purpose as a target.
If someone does send you that offending string, just send yourself a new text. You can tell Siri:
Send text to xxxx
Replace xxxx with your name, then respond to Siri with specifics when prompted for the phone number to use and the content of the text.
Hopefully, the Messages team is hard at work on a fix.
Apple needs to get their bug-squahing team back from vacation and do a better job. iCloud is a hot mess, iTunes is asking for passwords six times in a row, iBooks is demanding I put in my Apple Store password, in spite of the fact that it’s set to be disabled on my work Mac. They have no clear way to separate home and work phones, so it’s hard to send my Fiancée texts to one specific phone. The list is getting bigger by the day. These kinds of bugs don’t help when talking to people about why iOS is better than Android.
That last one is very much by design. iMessages are sent to people, not phones.
That doesn’t recognize how people use phones. My wife has my work cell and my personal cell loaded. One is appropriate for personal, non-emergency uses, the other is not. You could say the same thing about email, which is precisely why people separate out their work and personal email.
iMessage is one account, not one phone.
To send something to one phone, you use the phone number, not iMessage.
People don’t use iMessage like they use “a phone”, they use it like they use “a chat client” – on multiple devices.
That’s has a simple solution: Use a different iMessage account on each.
so you go ahead a get started on a comprehensive list of all possible combinations of unicode characters that might cause an app to crash.
there are almost a hundred thousand unicode chars
In Hrunga’s defense, it’s pretty bad that an un-renderable character string crashes the app (and reboots the device), as opposed to a more graceful way of saying “I don’t think so, Homey don’t play dat!”
What I always wonder when I hear about these specific “bugs” is just how anyone ever figures them out. How and why would anyone enter these specific characters?