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Apple to Fix Telugu Character Bug Causing Devices to Crash in Minor iOS Update
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And testing for 3 characters wouldn't have found that specific problem. The crashing character consists of 5 codepoints.
U+0C1C [Lo] TELUGU LETTER JA
U+0C4D [Mn] TELUGU SIGN VIRAMA
U+0C1E [Lo] TELUGU LETTER NYA
U+200C [Cf] ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
U+0C3E [Mn] TELUGU VOWEL SIGN AA
If you could test 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations per second testing all possible characters that consist of 5 codepoints would still take 1.5 years.
And testing for characters consisting of 5 codepoint still won't be enough. The family emoji for example is actually a sequence of 7 codepoints. Woman + Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) + Woman + ZWJ + Girl + ZWJ + Boy.
Unicode isn't like in the old times (like ASCII for example), where we had a direct 1:1 mapping between a codepoint and a character to render. Testing all Unicode combinations just won't work.
Maybe it's time to put text rendering in its own container, lol. It's a lot harder than most would think.
That's even more brutal.
I do think there's some automation to be added here, a process by which random sequences are contumely tested and known problematic sequences are tested with each build. Apple might already be doing that, though. It doesn't prevent issues like this, it just increases the coverage.
I am like a child who knows NOT to steal biscuits... I am SO tempted to post this character on here...
^ outs self as non-software-engineer complainer. Fixing ALL software bugs without ANYTHING EVER going awry is akin to expecting every SINGLE sentence uttered by every SINGLE person in the world, EVER, to never have contained one SINGLE spelling mistake or grammatical error, EVER.
Wonder if they’ll use automated testing to make sure this particular bug doesn’t happen? The fact that the glyph combinations could be tested, and Apple has computers to run stuff like this to catch things like this shows a lack of awareness on not just their part, but I can now know for a fact you assumed whom I am.
Lots, I’m sure.So how many stupid people are intentionally sending this now?
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Here is one... or at least their “friends”.Does anyone have/know a work around for this? Its ****ed my messages so hard! I cannot delete or go back to the main message screen
Yes, but they also had far far less features than they do today and they didn't integrate with the apple ecosystem.
I'm sure that IOS has far fewer bugs than the competitors, its certainly more universally maintained with patches but as always we hold Apple to a much higher standard than the competitors.
because
1) not all million indian users use that language.
2) and as much as it is a nice feature to support different languages, many stick to english as its easier to type compared to complex scripts of other languages (and also possibly coz thats how they have been doing all this while)
3) checked with my telugu speaking friend and the letters/words dont make any sense.
Sure, you can test this sequence so it never crashes again.
The number of sequences is without a bound, though.
Does anyone have/know a work around for this? Its ****ed my messages so hard! I cannot delete or go back to the main message screen
why did you input the characters in to your device knowing it would damage it?
I might have found a solution. At least it worked for me. From preferences I turned off all notifications for whatsapp and also disallowed its access to everything on the phone (contacts, photos, mic). Then I opened the contacts app, choose a user (any) who has whatsapp and from the contact card I selected "whatsapp call". Whatsapp opened back and asked me to give it access to the mic. I did and I was back in. Hope this might be of any help. I was in a whatsapp crash loop for about five hours.
This obscure character that makes apple gadgets crash is apparently not a single character but a complex of four unicode code points of Telugu placed in a particular order to form a syllable by some rendering engine. Out of these four characters, one does not appear on the surface. This hidden character can cause the problem that's observed with apple.
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What is happening to the quality of Apple's software development and in particular testing methodology? It seems like one flaw, issue or vulnerability after another. Under Tim Cook the quality of Apple's software has taken a significant nose dive. Software appears to be very much an afterthought. Apple are the new early two thousand's M$.
Mostly because we, even the ones with iPhones, have bigger problems than this bug.
Also, not all Indians speak Telugu. Going by wikipedia, about 6% of Indians speak Telugu.
Most Telugu users( including me) use English. Except when talking to elders who don’t can’t speak / understand English.
Telugu letters, we need to type few keystrokes and change keep browsing through few layouts before we get the desired word. Since most know English they use just English when using phones.
And interesting thing is younger generation type Telugu in English, though not perfect it does the job and keeps theirs native language touch ( especially those in the USA and outside India).
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Yeah few tried. “Telugu in the News and it’s Apple related “ it’s big news.
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It’s part of few words like “ gnanam” ( knowledge in Sanskrit ).
Yeah less used.
We use English when using phones instead of Telugu because it’s much easier and faster.
But the support for the characters has improved and iOS support is better.