THE NEWEST BUG TO CRASH SMARTPHONES

Image Courtesy - www.pexels.com


Do you remember the times when a text message in a specific language was shared amongst instant messaging platforms which had the ability to crash iPhones and even brick the phones?

Well, the newest member of the series seems to be back again. An Instagram story which had the same ability to make iPhones and androids freeze was published on a profile @pgtalal. 

It was originally in the stories and then added to highlights. When you go to see the story from an iPhone, it just crashes, without even opening the highlight completely. With an Android, you can only see a purplish background and a confetti effect. The profile appeared to be new, with around 70 000 followers at the time of writing. And it only had one post; a video which was a combination of a few videos which had around 2 million views before it was deleted or archived by the owner of the profile. 

When tested with a mid-range Android smartphone, it was clear that the phone was having trouble processing the highlight, it struggled with the confetti animation while an old android smartphone with a slower chipset just froze at the story with a completely black screen. 

YouTuber MrWhosTheBoss has looked into this smartphone crashing Instagram story and figured out that the developer had just added a countdown timer sticker to the story. And it was set to a past date. So, whenever someone opens the story, the timer had already run out, so it gives out the default confetti effect. 

But wait, there was no timer to be seen on the story in the first place. How could it be possible then?

Well, the so-called ‘full-stack developer’ – One who’s capable of developing both the front end and back end of a program; had gotten into the code of the story and have changed the value of the width of the sticker countdown element to a 20+ digit number. It should be a value between 0 and 1 by default. Stating how much of a percentage it takes up from the screen’s width. But as it was set to a very high value, the phones had trouble figuring out the size and crashed. Ultimately a severe crash for the phones with a less capable processer. 

It is better not to go and open the highlight on @pgtalal ‘s Instagram highlight if you want to keep your smartphone trouble-free. Almost all of the phones were able to recover after the crash, but who knows what will happen with so many different smartphone models out there.

-Damsara-


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