Indian Unicode symbol crashes iOS, macOS, and watchOS

It seems like the “Effective Power” bug keeps making a comeback after a few weeks. Here’s a new Unicode symbol bug that plagues all devices running Apple’s operating systems.

Effective power makes a comeback to iOS

The new Unicode bug crashes iOS devices whenever you try to open any message containing the Indian symbol “జ్ఞ‌ా”.

Apart from iPhones and iPads, Mac computers and Apple Watch are also affected.

Whenever text renderers such as TextField, Label, or TextView try to render this Unicode symbol, the entire system crashes. 

Subsequently, your device goes all the way back to the lock screen without any way to get in. Your device gets stuck in a “crash loop” just like it gets stuck on a bootloop or a respring loop.

crash iPhone message

As far its compatibility goes, it works perfectly on all iOS 11-iOS 11.2.5 versions. Moreover, iOS 10 versions up till iOS 10.3.3 also came under the ambit.

Thankfully, newer versions such as iOS 11.3 beta builds are immune to this Unicode bug.

Surprisingly, this bug comes just weeks after Abraham Masri’s chaiOS bug that crashed a lot of iPhones. It clearly suggests Apple is yet to pull the plug on “Effective Power” bugs.

How to crash anyone’s iPhone with this bug

You can easily prank your friends or just target random Internet users for fun with this amazing new bug.

You can also download its XCode playground for testing purposes from this link. Open it in XCode or Atom text editor once you download it.

hacker

Just follow the steps given below and you are golden.

  • Send the “జ్ఞ‌ా” symbol to anyone. For example, you could try sending a Twitter DM to the target user.
  • The target user then opens the notification.
  • iOS tries to render the buggy Unicode symbol and crashes.
  • The target device boots back to the lock screen.
  • Whenever the user tries to unlock his iPhone, it will try to read the notification and crash again.

How to fix affected devices

Fortunately, this bug isn’t as widespread because it went public just a few hours ago. However, if you were affected by it, you can try the following method to fix your iPhone.

  • Open Camera and take a photo.
  • View the photo you just took from the bottom-left corner.
  • Press the All Photos button present in the top-right corner in the camera roll.
  • It will then ask you to key in your passcode. Type your 6-digit passcode.
  • Switch to Settings.
  • Turn off notifications for Twitter or your Twitter client.

That’s how simple it really is! Your device will no longer crash. If this fix didn’t work for you, check this tutorial out.

For more iOS security news and updates, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

32 Comments

  1. The apple worker from CA May 14, 2018
    • iOS Expert May 16, 2018
  2. Shrek March 23, 2018
  3. GuywhosphonesBroken February 23, 2018
    • iOS Expert February 24, 2018
    • Sven May 21, 2018
  4. justin69 February 22, 2018
    • Bruh Moment May 26, 2019
  5. AppleSucks February 17, 2018
    • iOS Expert February 18, 2018
      • AppleSucks February 18, 2018
        • iOS Expert February 18, 2018
          • AppleSucks February 18, 2018
          • iOS Expert February 18, 2018
          • AppleSucks February 18, 2018
          • iOS Expert February 19, 2018
  6. ios 10.1.1 February 16, 2018
    • iOS Expert February 16, 2018
      • Ali mostafa June 7, 2018
  7. Luca February 15, 2018
    • iOS Expert February 15, 2018
      • Carlos Van Kurczyn February 16, 2018
        • iOS Expert February 16, 2018
        • Alex February 23, 2018
    • Carlos Van Kurczyn February 15, 2018
      • iOS Expert February 15, 2018
  8. Divyansh Jain February 15, 2018
    • zapl February 15, 2018
    • skizzy1239 May 9, 2018
  9. Vansh February 15, 2018
    • iOS Expert February 15, 2018
    • JA February 15, 2018

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