WhatsApp on Android can easily crash if you send a special large message. Is your Whatsapp crashing unexpectedly ?
Your friend might have sent a message to you on Whatsapp making you unable to see the message or reply to them.
Indian research students Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar,showed how a simple text message with 2,000 characters — about 2KB worth of data — could crash whomever’s app it’s sent to.
Here is the message they sent.
Unfortunately the horror doesn’t simply end at the initial crash. Attempting to go back into the message thread will cause another force close.
How to fix the problem ?
- One way is to completely delete the entire conversation.
- If you don't wan't to delete the conversation, you could ask the same person to send a few more regular messages, and the trick message would go out of visibility. Then you can open the message thread.
- Update : With the updated version of Whatsapp for Android, the bug no longer affects Whatsapp and you can read the old messages.
While some may only think of the exploit as a tool for trolling and pranking your friends, this exploit effectively allows you to wipe anyone’s archived chat history with you if they didn't know the second and third options listed above.
There was a Nokia bug in 2009 that did a similar thing called text of silence.
Update : iPhone bug crashes iMessenger with an evil text message "effective Power Arabic"