A new mysterious bug found on the WhatsApp is causing the app to crash, it is the black dot emoji that when touched crashes or freezes the app. It is not tapping the emoji that causes the crash as much as what lies underneath it, meaning that tapping anywhere on the message; "<⚫> 👈🏻 can't touch this" can trigger the bug. The fact behind this is that there are around two thousand invisible characters in the message that ends up causing Android's text rendering engine to crash, especially on older devices. While some modern phones recover after freezing. The invisible part of the message has special characters which Unicode uses to specify whether the text need to be written right-to-left or left-to-right and sometimes these characters are needed to properly display text in languages that are written right-to-left, such as Hebrew and Arabic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC4NNUYIIdM Modern devices have been able to handle LTR and RTL texts even within same sentences, but the issue only shows up when a strange combination of characters trigger a bug in the rendering engine which is what that is happening now. The sequence of two thousand characters switches the text's orientation back and forth repeatedly, but when the engine fails ...
Monday, 7 May 2018
Black Dot emoji message could crash Android messaging apps
A new mysterious bug found on the WhatsApp is causing the app to crash, it is the black dot emoji that when touched crashes or freezes the app. It is not tapping the emoji that causes the crash as much as what lies underneath it, meaning that tapping anywhere on the message; "<⚫> 👈🏻 can't touch this" can trigger the bug. The fact behind this is that there are around two thousand invisible characters in the message that ends up causing Android's text rendering engine to crash, especially on older devices. While some modern phones recover after freezing. The invisible part of the message has special characters which Unicode uses to specify whether the text need to be written right-to-left or left-to-right and sometimes these characters are needed to properly display text in languages that are written right-to-left, such as Hebrew and Arabic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC4NNUYIIdM Modern devices have been able to handle LTR and RTL texts even within same sentences, but the issue only shows up when a strange combination of characters trigger a bug in the rendering engine which is what that is happening now. The sequence of two thousand characters switches the text's orientation back and forth repeatedly, but when the engine fails ...
