Apple has officially recognized the Telugu iOS 11 bug that causes apps and iPhones to crash upon receiving a Telugu character via iMessage. The company has promised to roll out an over-the-air update soon to fix the bug. Telugu is a language spoken by more than 70 million people in southern India. The Telugu iOS 11 bug can also crash third-party apps like Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Outlook, and WhatsApp. Skype and Telegram are the only major messaging services unaffected by the issue.
Apple told The Verge that the bug affects not only iPhones but also Macs, iPads, Apple Watch, and Apple TV running the latest versions of their respective software. Though iOS 11.3 will include the bug fix, Apple will release an urgent update before iOS 11.3 to fix the Telugu character bug. The public beta version of iOS 11.3 has already resolved the issue, which means Apple was aware of it even before Italian blog Mobile World discovered it.
A fix for watchOS 4, tvOS 11, and macOS High Sierra versions will also be rolled out soon. If you receive a message containing the Telugu character or type the character in the text editor, it will cause the respective app to crash. Even third-party apps are vulnerable to the bug. If the symbol appears in a notification, it causes the entire device to crash. Your device goes into a bootloop, restarting endlessly without booting up.
The iOS Springboard crashes upon receiving the message. The app on which you received the message becomes frozen and inaccessible as the app tries and fails to load the character. According to OpenRadar, inserting the Telugu language character in system text renderers such as TextField, Label, and TextView also results in crash. If you have fallen victim to it, you should wait for the Springboard to restart because forcing a reboot would put your device into an endless bootloop.
For now, the only way to resolve the issue is to have a friend send you a message, and then delete the thread containing the Telugu character. The Messages app starts working properly once the offensive character has been removed by deleting the thread. The origins of the Telugu iOS 11 bug are still unknown, though the bug itself was discovered earlier this week.
The iOS 11.3 will bring a Battery Health feature that will allow you to check if Apple is throttling your iPhone’s performance, and you can turn it off. Other features include Face ID for family account purchases, an Augmented Reality (AR) upgrade, and new Animojis. Tons of bugs have been discovered in the iOS 11. That, coupled with the backlash over performance throttling, has forced Apple to delay the release of new features until 2019. With the upcoming iOS 12 software, Apple will focus on performance, reliability, and security.
The iOS has suffered from many similar bugs in the past that would cause the iPhones to crash upon receiving text characters, videos, images, and even URLs. Last month, the chaiOS bug caused the iOS and macOS devices to crash after receiving a URL. In December, Apple had to roll out an urgent software update to fix a bug that would crash iOS devices. Another bug discovered last year would cause iPhones running iOS 10 to crash after receiving a white flag emoji, a VS16 character, a zero, and a rainbow emoji. Users have also suffered from similar bugs in 2016 and 2015.
