We’re not sure why this seems to only affect iOS users, but for some reason in the past few years, there have been several bugs related to the Messages app that when viewed or clicked, will cause the iPhone to crash. Unfortunately it seems that these bugs are popping up as quickly as they are being squashed because a new one has recently been discovered.
According to reports, it seems that if a message is sent that contains the ⚫ Unicode character, it will cause the Messages app to crash. If you think Apple might have known about it, it seems that they haven’t, or if they did they have yet to fix it because it appears to be active on both iOS 11.3 and iOS 11.4 which is currently in beta.
A similar problem was discovered on Android a while back and it seems that it has found its way onto iOS, so hopefully Apple will address this soon. To Apple’s credit, they have been relatively quick when it comes to squashing such bugs, so hopefully we won’t have to wait until the release of iOS 11.4 to see a fix.
We’re not sure what could be causing the problem, but it seems to be a memory thing. According to the video above by EverythingApplePro, they note that the more of these dots that are sent, the slower the phone seems to get until the app just freezes completely. There is no workaround as it seems that even if you force close the app and reopen it, as long as it reopens to the same message the crash will occur again.
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