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Clicking on Links in iOS 9.3 Can Crash Your iPhone and iPad (apple.com)

Posted by msmash on from the don't-click-on-that-link dept.

Reader lxrocks writes: Many users are experiencing an issue with their iPhone and iPad wherein trying to open a link on Safari, Mail, Chrome or any other app causes it to freeze and crash. The issue renders any type of search with Safari as useless as none of the links returned will open. The wide-spread issue -- for which there's no known workaround just yet -- seems to be affecting users on both iOS 9.2 and iOS 9.3. Apple has acknowledged the issue and says it will release a fix "soon." There's no official word on what's causing the issue, but a popular theory with developers is that the glitch has something to do with Universal Links, a feature Apple first introduced with iOS 9. It appears some apps, such as Booking.com, are abusing this capability, causing the Universal Link database to overload.

3 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Is it somehow dependent on the search engine? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have DuckDuckGo set as my default, and I haven't seen this at all.

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    #DeleteChrome
  2. Re:Hooray for Agile development! by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 5, Informative

    I suspect this is an intermittent bug. Anecdotally my wife and I have been on 9.3 for at least a week or two and have had no problems. This might be one of those things that slipped by because it's really hard to reproduce.

    That said, I have not been impressed with Apple's software quality in the last couple of years. I don't know if it's because it got a lot more complicated when it went 64-bit or if it's because when Steve was here he cracked the whip a lot harder, but I've definitely witnessed a lot more silliness in the software recently. iOS 9.x was supposed to be the bug-fix version, but I ain't seeing it.

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    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  3. Re:Hooray for Agile development! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The bug won't express itself unless you have an app that ignores the wild-card capabilities of the Universal Link associations, *and* has a huge number of links defined (such as the Booking.com app which did their definitions in *exactly* the wrong way, having a defined link to each hotel, rather than '.../hotel/*').

    The underlying code does need to be fixed, but the sort of thing needed to expose it is exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't expect to run across, and therefore probably wouldn't think to test against.

    There's more details here:
    http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/03/poorly-behaved-app-causing-crashes-and-link-problems-for-some-ios-9-x-users/