A single Message can crash your iPhone, iPad and your Apple Watch. Here’s how to prevent it temporarily

Apparently there’s a little iOS bug that could cause any iPhone, iPad and even the Apple Watch to crash or reboot. The cause? A specific line of unicode that looks like random mix of arabic and other characters. This is due to iOS difficulty of rendering them on the notification screen and pranksters are using this to annoy iOS users until an official fix is released.

To prevent yourself from being a repeat victim, the folks at iMore had shared a few remedial steps which you can take right now. Since the bug is triggered automatically from the notification screen, the obvious fix is to disable message notifications from appearing.

For iPhone and iPad users, you can do this by heading over to Settings > Notifications > Messages, and disable “Show on Lock Screen”. The Apple Watch isn’t spared either, so you would need to do the same from the Apple Watch App under Notifications > Messages, and disable “Show Alerts”. Chances are, not many would be affected but who knows if you have that one friend who would take this opportunity to annoy you to the max.

If you do receive the troublesome line of unicode, you won’t be able to load the Messages app until you receive a fresh new message. To do this, you can get a friend to send you a clean message or send a photo to yourself from Photos.

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