You might think of malware or poorly coded programs as common causes of a crashed phone,
but users of both Android and iOS have reported their devices being taken down by things as
simple as text messages or even photos.
How in the world could receiving a string of characters or loading up a picture force
your phone to shut down or worse get stuck in a boot loop?
Let's start with text bombs, which have notably affected iPhones several times in recent
years. A text bomb is simply a specific string of text that will cause your device to crash
because it can't handle it correctly. Typically, a text bomb may contain symbols, emojis, or rarely used characters that make
your phone do additional processing. One well-known example is the rainbow glitch from a few years ago, where typing a white
flag emoji, the number zero, and then a rainbow emoji, and then sending it, would cause the
recipient's phone to freeze because iOS tried to combine these characters into a rainbow
flag, but a bug in the programming kept it from doing so properly.
More recently, we saw a certain text string in the Cindy language, which is spoken in
parts of India and Pakistan, crash some devices running iOS 13.
The bug was caused because some languages written in a Perso-Arabic script, including
Cindy, stack diacritical marks on top of the main characters, meaning that an individual
character can get quite tall, with lots of marks above and below it.
When iOS went to show you the abbreviated version before you opened your full messaging
app, it would get confused because it didn't know how to handle the extra character bulk.
Ultimately, the operating system would try to access an area of RAM that didn't even
exist, and if you know anything about programming, memory faults like this commonly cause crashes.
Now let's shift gears and talk about how photos can also bring down your phone.
In May 2020, there was an innocent enough looking photo of a landscape circulating that caused
some Android phones to crash if users tried setting it as their wallpaper, ironic given
the tranquil mountain scenery that it contained.
The issue here had to do with color space. You can learn more about color spaces right up here, but put simply, it's the system
that software and hardware use to store color information and reproduce colors accurately.
The Android operating system uses the sRGB color space, which is quite standard across
the web. Every pixel in an sRGB image has its red, blue, and green values, the three primary
colors expressed as 8 bits, so each pixel can have 255 different intensities of red,
green, and blue to create whatever color you're supposed to see.
The problem is, if an image is coded to use a different color space, it might support
more values than just 8 bits per channel RGB.
So if the values in an expanded color space are higher than what the sRGB-only operating
system expects, it can generate what's called an out-of-bounds exception and make your phone
crash since the OS doesn't know what to do with those values.
Making matters worse, because your wallpaper obviously loads whenever you restart your
phone, incidents like these can trap your device in a boot loop, meaning you might have
to resort to a complete factory reset to resolve the problem.
What can you do as a user to prevent this kind of misfortune?
Well, unfortunately, these issues are really just caused by programming bugs, so the best
thing you can do is keep tabs on your favorite tech news sites and steer clear of any game-breaking
texts or photos until the problem is patched.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to message some beautiful pictures to people that I don't
like. So thanks for watching, guys! Like, dislike, check out our other videos, leave a comment with video suggestions, and
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