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.

Comments

User's Fault

[avandesande]

You are clicking the links the wrong way!

Hooray for Agile development!

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:Hooray for Agile development!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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.

Re:Hooray for Agile development!

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Is it somehow dependent on the search engine?

[93 Escort Wagon]

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

Re:Apple Feature!

[anegg]

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.