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Apple has released a fix for a bug that was causing rashes on each of its respective platforms. The company has released new versions of iOS, watchOS and macOS to fix these exact issues. The issue was caused when someone pasted in or received a single Indian-language character in select communications apps — most notably in the App Store, iMessage and Safari.
Basically, you had to use a specific character in the Telugu language native to India. This was enough to crash a variety of chat apps, including iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Twitter and Gmail. It appears that Skype and Telegram were immune to the bug.
This issue was in particular troubling for iPhone users, as the affected apps would continue to crash even after users tried to reload them, basically shutting them out entirely. In order to get things to work again, users would have to go through complex workarounds to liberate the app. To make things worse, it could even reportedly crash the entire iOS Springboard software that runs the home screen on devices.
In this software update, it includes everything from App Store to tvOS. Per the security updates page from Apple, the following updates have been pushed out today:
- The latest version of iOS is 11.2.6
- The latest version of macOS is 10.13.3
- The latest version of tvOS is 11.2.5
- The latest version of watchOS is 6.2.3
