Will Apple's update firefight 'Telugu text bomb'?
After facing flak for letting a rogue Telugu character bring down many of its devices to their knees, Tech giant Apple on February 20 rolled out minor software updates to fix the "Telugu text bomb" issue.
First reported earlier last week, the bug impacts a wide range of Apple devices running the previous versions of iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS. According to reports, the effects of this bug range from system crashes to access to apps such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook, Messenger, and Gmail being lost.
Though Apple had earlier confirmed the bug and stated that they would fix the issue with the 11.3 update, the company has gone ahead and come out with this minor update – 11.2.6 on iOS – to fix an issue that looked to be turning into a PR disaster.
So what does the update fix?
The bug causes serious headache when a Unicode character from the Telugu language – native tongue of at least 75 million people – is sent to a user's phone via any of these text messaging or social media apps. The bug then wreaks havoc by sending your Apple device into a deep dark pit of unresponsiveness, apps crashes, and in some cases may even initiate a bootloop as soon as this Telugu character appears on the screen.
All this because the Telugu text bomb, when sent to an Apple device, causes a malfunction in CoreText. The malfunction causes CoreText to access memory that is invalid, which forces the operating system to force shut down any affected application or even the SpringBoard – a core part of the iOS – if the character finds its way to the notifications screen.
How to update
For iOS users looking to update to 11.2.6 to avoid facing the fallout of being affected by the Telugu text bomb, all that needs to be done is to head over to Settings>General>Software update on your iPhone and download the latest update.
However, before users can initiate the update, it needs to be made sure that the user is connected to WiFi and has more than 50 per cent charge on their phones.
What next?
Though the tech giant does not bring much in terms of new features with this latest update, Apple has promised its iOS users a number of interesting features with its next update – 11.3.
Being a major update, expect this one to bring several new features, including a new battery health menu that prevents iPhone speed throttling.