iOS is not the most stable software. Siri nearly sold out your photos and contacts before Apple frantically repaired it. iOS 10 turned out to be a battery hog unless you tweaked a bunch of settings. And now it looks like there’s another bug free in the wild: A video that can crash your iPhone seconds after you watch it.
The good news is that this isn’t an intentional hack, or at least doesn’t seem like one yet. If you receive a specific corrupted video file in your texts, and open it with the default player on iPhone, the video will cause an endless loop in the background and crash your iPhone, a short while after you boot up the video. The only way out of it is to hold power and home at the same time, giving your iPhone a hard reset.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to avoid this: Just don’t open any video files, specifically MP4s, sent to you via text. But it is a little worrying that Apple, with its closed architecture and “it just works” philosophy, keeps running into problems like this on software a fair chunk of the world relies on to communicate. Hopefully iOS 10.2, currently in beta, will fix this, and we can keep an eye out for the next bug.
(via The Verge)
