Fancy totally upsetting your iPhone friends? Well, send them a text. It seems that if that text has a certain Arabic character sequence in it then it’ll totally ruin their day. Good huh?
Well maybe. Something like this…
لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ
冗
..will totally crash their phone. Or this…
effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗
Here’s a video of the “fun trick”…
https://youtu.be/QyaUX5gZIjs
If your iPhone friends turn off the message notifications then it apparently doesn’t happen (details below), but it’s still a rather painful bug. As the message will keep appearing when your phone powers up again, you’ll need to somehow clear it. This is done by either using Siri to send a message or get the person who sent you the text to send another.
Go into your settings, then Notifications, Messages and then switch off the slider called “show on local screen”. Under “alert style when unlocked” choose “none.”
At least we don’t live in a world where this sort of thing is actively encouraged and we don’t have mobile plans with thousands and thousands of free texts so that you can totally annoy each and everyone who posses an iPhone. Oh no..
Update – Apple say that they are aware of the iMessage issue caused by the specific series of unicode characters and they’ll issue a fix at some point.