This single character will crash your iPhone and here’s the fix

A few days ago, a bug involving an Indian Telugu character was found to cause some serious problems for Apple users. It seems that iOS, watchOS and even macOS devices have trouble rendering this character and it causes the respective apps to crash.

It’s a critical bug since anyone with ill-intentions can send you a text with this character and you won’t be able to open your messaging app again as long as the character continues to be displayed. This even affects Facebook, Twitter and on any social platform that allows anyone to post this problematic character.

Due to the severity of this bug, Apple has finally released a fix and it’s available now to all iOS users with iOS 11.2.6.

This is a minor update and it addresses this Telugu character bug and another issue with 3rd party apps being unable to connect to your external accessories.

To update, just head over to your iPhone’s Settings > General > Software Update and tap on Download and Install. The update is about 41.5MB in size and it’s is fairly quick to install. Apart from iOS, Apple has also issued an update for watchOS, tvOS and macOS users as well.

The next iOS update will be iOS 11.3 and that will come with new features including the option to disable throttling on your old iPhone.