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Clicking on Links in iOS 9.3 Can Crash Your iPhone and iPad (apple.com)
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.
It's interesting to see such a large company letting a bug like this slip by, especially in an operating system. You would think even with an Agile "ship it broken, we'll patch later" mentality, they would have armies of QA people and automated scripts banging away at every corner of the OS. Something like "clicking on any link in our bundled browser with JavaScript turned on crashes the application" seems to me like a showstopper bug.
I'm all for getting stuff rolled out in a reasonable time frame, but core stuff like an operating system needs to be tested a lot more intensely than some social media/dating app. Not everyone is connected 24/7 with easy access to patches...the product I currently do systems engineering work for is used almost exclusively in offline environments.
"In iOS 9, developers can take advantage of a feature called "Universal Links" to associate their apps with their websites. When their app is installed on your phone or tablet, links to those sites open up in their apps instead of in Safari as they normally would. It turns out that the app for travel site Booking.com crammed every single URL from its site into the list of associated links in its app
OK. Stupid behavior on the part of an app developer. Fair enough.
But there's a bigger problem here . . . this bizarre mindset of creating an "app" to do things that can be/should be done by an ordinary web browser. Why exactly do you need an "app" for Booking.com at all? Yes, I know, everyone likes to app while they app, so now it is fashionable to put apps in their apps so they can app while they app. (Yo Dawg!)
But this is just fucking stupid, and it appears that this stupid fixation on "apps" is starting to come back to bite people in the ass.
I myself am unamused at the proliferation of "apps" that don't do much more than a web site would do. I tend not to install them, and even uninstalled a few that I had installed because I found that I really didn't like the automatic switch from the web site to the app when I just wanted to use the web site (Amazon, for instance). Although I am not an expert in iOS app development, I suspect that an app gives the vendor the potential for much greater access to personal data on the device than just going through Safari. In some cases the app may provide for a better user experience, but keeping vendors at arm's length through the browser seems more secure to me.