An odd software bug which causes the iPhone's Messages application to crash and sends the handset into a respring after a certain text is received affects the iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, too. In addition, the text bug apparently affects third-party social and messaging apps that deal with text, including WhatsApp, Twitter and Snapchat, The Guardian newspaper learned today.
That's hardly surprising. The issue can be traced back to a specific series of Unicode characters, suggesting a bug in the text engine framework called CoreText that exists in iOS and OS X.
That would explain why third-party apps that deal with messages, like Twitter and Snapchat, were affected as they tap into Apple's CoreText engine to manage strings of text and layouts.