Apple Releases iOS 9.3.1 With Fix For Unresponsive Links

An anonymous reader writes: Apple, on Thursday, rolled out a minor update to iPhone, iPad, and iPod devices. The update, dubbed iOS 9.3.1, brings with it a fix for a software glitch that caused many apps -- including Safari, and Chrome -- to freeze and crash when trying to open a link. The issue was related to Universal Link, a feature Apple first introduced with iOS 9. Many reported that some apps including Booking.com were abusing this capability, causing the Universal Link database to overload.

Comments

Re:Found a bug and fixed it.

[tlhIngan]

Their QA department somehow missed that iOS 9.3 made it so that links broke in the mobile browser.

How do you miss that? How shoddy do your testing practices have to be to miss that you've broken LINKS?!

No, links were not broken. Certain apps broke it by being stupid about how it does things.

What happens is some apps allow deep linking - so you can browse in Safari and then have a link open in an app. Perhaps you're shopping on Amazon and if you have the Amazon app, it will allow you to view the link in the Amazon app instead of just opening the page. The deep link will tell the Amazon app to not show its normal front page, but to go directly what the user was looking at. So if you did a search for an item, it would open with the search results.

The problem was, you're supposed to list the URLs you allow, using wildcards if necessary. Some apps, like Booking.com, instead enumerated EVERY link on their website and told the OS to use that, rather than wildcard linking. So the file they presented to the OS was around 2.8MB of URLs.

The problem is when the OS URL handler started looking through, well, it was not supposed to be presented with lists of thousands of URLs, which caused it to crash.

So yeah, the links worked, just some apps broke it. So of course it would pass QA because it was only stupidly coded apps that broke. The affected apps have been removed.