New 'Black Dot' Text Bug Crashes Messages App On iOS Devices

A new text bug has been discovered and it is causing the iOS Messages app to crash. Dubbed the “Black Dot” bug, the new flaw appears to be affecting iPhones and iPads running iOS 11.3 and the iOS 11.4 beta.

The Black Dot bug was first reported by YouTuber EverythingApplePro. The issue appears to have originated from Android as a bug related to WhatsApp. The original iteration of this bug was being spread using a combination of a black dot emoji and a hand pointing to it. When an iPhone user receives this message, and they try to read it, the iOS Messages app will crash continuously even if the user force closes the Messages app.

This appears to be a Unicode text bug that contains thousands of invisible Unicode characters. The invisible Unicode characters are then processed through the CPU, causing the app to crash. The sheer amount and possibly conflicting characters in this succession consumes a lot of memory and a lot of processing power thus causing the crash, according to AppleInsider.

The Black Dot bug is affecting iPhones and iPads running iOS 11.3 and the beta releases of iOS 11.4. Since the bug is still present in the iOS 11.4 beta, this is a brand new issue that Apple needs to fix quickly. After all, the final release of iOS 11.4 is expected to come in just a few weeks.

9To5Mac also discovered that the bug appears to be present in macOS. For Mac computers, the bug created a 30 gigabyte swap file process. Although it hasn’t been tested yet, it’s possible that the bug may also be present in watchOS and tvOS too. For users who may be affected by the Black Dot bug on their iOS devices, there’s a couple of workarounds that get rid of the problem.

The first involves navigating away from the screen that displays the malicious message. Users can do this by forcing the Messages app to close then using the 3D Touch shortcut to create a new message. When that’s done, users will be able to backtrack to the main Messages list and delete the malicious message. Another workaround involves deleting the message from another iOS device. However, this will only work if the other iOS device is connected to the same iCloud account.

Apple is typically quick when it comes to fixing bugs in iOS. This new Black Dot bug is somewhat similar to the Telugu character bug that was discovered back in February.