A weird Arabic text was sent to my iPhone and caused it to crash, my iPhone seems to be acting fine however someone I know cannot open their messages app. Help?
My friend tried restarting the app multiple times, opening and closing the app, turning on and off imessage, nothing seems to work, I guess the next action should probably be to resync?
iPhone 6 Plus, iOS 8.3, null
By the way I found a fix to the crashing message problem, I just sent a lot more messages to my friend and it unloaded the message that was crashing the app and it was fixed
Below are the workarounds Apple suggests to solve the issue of the crashing Messages app:
I've submitted a notice to the internal staff forum looking for more information. However, a web search hasn't returned anything newer than September 2013, and that one was fixed. The string then was:
سمَـَّوُوُحخ ̷̴̐خ ̷̴̐خ ̷̴̐خ امارتيخ ̷̴̐خ
You see a link, I see an image? weird
Oh, do you mean the link in the image, that link has nothing to do with the problem, the problem was caused by the message after the link that says "effective. power"
Are we seeing the same image, the image i sent above is a groupchat with messages: "None so far, if u guys want to spare a dollar..." and then there is a message that says, "effective. power", then has a bunch of weird arabic or irregular symbols and continues to say "send that to someone with an iphone it turns their phone off"
IGNORE THIS
That happened to me too. I called Apple and they hadn't heard about it so the tech guy and I found out that you have to restore your iPhone to its original settings or to the backup that was before the text was sent. It worked for me. Just make sure all of your important things that you want are updated to your computer.
this same problem is happening to me too, but I cant even access my messages app. it will pop up blank then go right back to the home page. I turned my phone off and on again multiple times and nothing seems to work.
Go into your photos & send a bunch to whomever sent you the demon text. This was the only thing that worked for me. I was about to do a total reset on my phone (which I REALLY did not wanna do because obviously I'd lose all my stuff.) But when i went into my photos, selected some, & clicked send via message IT WORKED! I sent them to my ******* sister who sent me the text in the first place! Gotta love spam. I hope this helps!!
I work for a call center for a large cell phone company, our call centers are being hammered with this issue.
A less invasive workaround we've found is to have the victim send a picture message (started via Photos app) back to the original sender, which seems to restore the Messages app functionality, then *immediately* delete the entire conversation with the original sender.
I received the text message as well and it crashed my text messages I wasn't able to send out a text or even open up my text messages. It would just close me out of it. So this is what you need to do Go to your photo album and click on a photo and just start sending it to everyone through via text message that sent you that evil text message and it SHOULD WORK! Hope this helps. It worked for me and my friends
My son and I were playing with this, well him mostly, and he's checked it across all the iphone platforms we have, 5 and up, all running iOS 8.3 and it turns off all of them EXCEPT mine. The only readily apparent difference between mine and the rest are the privacy tweaks I've had set since my iPhone 4, when I found out Apple was collecting location information and other data for potential advertising mining.
Could be a place to start looking for a kludge to neutralize this till a fix is done.
Just rad on another site that they have found that the text is presented to banners and it causes a fail in the operation that crashes the phone (turns it off) for most and causes a more frustrating problem if it also crashes messages.
THat hat would explain why it didn't effect my phone as I have banners turned off for messenger. It would also explain why others report no issues if the text appears while they are in the screen with the person sending it. No banner.
THat hat is what is being reported elsewhere. I have not replicated same so this is second hand info.
Settings -> Notifications -> Messages -> Show Previews -> OFF (gray switch, NOT green).
Alert style when unlocked set to "none"..
iIf what has been reported on Reddit is true and it is the text string being fed to banners that is crashing the phones, these are the settings I've had on my phone that kept it from effecting me when my son tested it on my phone.
Had to wait till my wife came home to check it on hers. It crashed when I sent the string. I changed her settings as I suggested above, banners to none and preview off, sent the malicious message again and her phone was fine.
So the work around till its fixed is to turn off banners and preview for messages.
If your messaging app crashes everytime you open it
1. Go To Your Photos
2. Click Any Photo
3. Send To The Person That Sent You/ You Sent The Link/Code To
Once The Photo Sends
4. Try To Open Your Messaging App Again
It Should Work. It Worked For Me
A string of text sent in a message Crashes Iphone
