Apple Posts Temporary Workaround For iPhone’s Crippling Texting Bug

We posted earlier this week about a bizarre bug that strikes when a specific text message is received by an iOS user, either via Messages or SMS. Composed of various unicode characters, receiving this specific message can lock up the device, and render the Messages app useless until the bug is dealt with. When the bug leaked to the Web earlier this week, there were some suggestions of how to fix it, but now Apple itself has jumped in with suggestions of its own.

With an iPhone or other bugged iOS device at-the-ready, you'll need to ask Siri to "read unread messages". Then, with the malicious message selected, you can ask Siri to reply to it -- not type a reply in manually. Once that's done, Apple says that Messages will go back to normal.

I still find it amazing that a simple text message could cause such a bug to occur, but we're fortunate enough that at best, it causes brief hiccups with the OS, and can be easily fixed. It'd be neat to see the numbers for how many times the message was sent since Wednesday!

Of course, the ultimate fix will be a patch, and fortunately Apple has promised that a future update will take care of that. While a hotfix seems appropriate with a bug like this, Apple likely considers the issue to be minimal at best. Even still, we'd hope it won't take too long before that fix comes along.