Do you own an iPhone? In the U.S, 43.5% of people with a smartphone own iPhones (2018). If you don’t own one, perhaps getting the phone you currently have was a good choice, because this one bug in the iPhone’s software, the iOS. What are the most popular apps on any smartphone? The answer is social media. Everyone has it, from Instagram to Facebook. Even an email is technically a social media. The average person spends an average of one hour and 40 minutes on social media every day. Obviously, this is some sort of a problem, being on electronics for too long, but the real problem is if you can’t access it at all or spend any time on it. This is because of a bug in the latest iOS.

In iOS 11.2.5, if two non English words showed up on the screen of a social media app, it would crash. It was thoroughly tested with two iPhones on an older version of iOS and one on the same iOS, and it still occurred. Apps this can happen on are Messages, Twitter, Mail/Gmail, Facebook, and other social media. Apple is trying to fix this right now, but it is hard. The symbols that crash the apps are Unicode characters (҂, ֎, etc.). This creates a large problem, because Unicode has become an international constant for written languages. This essentially means that you can’t use a worldwide keyboard without the app crashing.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. “In January, there was news that a single link could freeze an iPhone. Apple fixed the issue in iOS 11.2.5. A video that lasted only a few seconds could bring down iPhones in 2016. In 2015, a bit of text could crash iMessage.” These problems have not only been occurring in iPhones, but in other Apple products, such as its Macs. The same problem that crash social media apps also crash Chrome on Macs. This is a huge waste of time, especially for people who are actually working on projects and/or other work. It disrupts their thinking process and they lose work time.

Even though this is just one bug on the phone, countered by many different good aspects of the iPhone, this is still a big problem. Not only does this annoy many people who are using social media, but this gets in the way of everyone. Everyone is frustrated because Apple keeps on getting these types of problems, and no one will handle it anymore. Hopefully, in the near future, Apple can fix its issues for good, and everyone will be happier, even though they already own one of the world’s most popular piece of technology.