Editorial Staff
It was recently found that iOS software quality is coming under fire after crashing when playing a five-second video on the iPhone. The bug, which was only recently discovered, notes that an iPhone user only has to click on an MP4 file and begin watching it to find their own phones crash. Multiple iPhones were tested, all of which came to the same end result of locking up right after playing the video.
Everything gets started when an iPhone user receives an iMessage that contains a link to play the video. The default player begins to play the file after which it appears that the video itself is corrupt and generates a loop. About ten seconds later, the iPhone crashes. It has also been found that the video has to be accessed from the link, as a transferred file will not crash an iPhone.
The only way to come back from this crash is to hold the power button at the same time as holding the home button, which will then perform a hard reset. Once rebooted in this manner, the iPhone should work normally afterwards.
It may be that the reason Apple’s software validity is being question is that this is not the first time that a bug has crashed an iOS in such a manner. A string of text was discovered last year that went on to disable the iMessage app on iPhones, a problem which was addressed by the updating to iOS 8.4. Not long afterwards, Safari began to crash on iPhones, thanks to an issue with the software, which was taken care of quite quickly.
While most bugs have been caught and quickly rectified, it has many iPhone users wondering why Apple’s quality assurance centers did not catch this. Could it be something that is happening after the software comes out, or is it a bug that is built in to the software? In any case, it should be common knowledge that an improperly formatted video stream should be handled with the utmost care, if even opened at all.
There is no clear cause for this particular malfunction. The best explanation so far as been that the video clip is just a video file that has been corrupted and causes a memory leak when Safari loads it. The iOS then fails to be able to handle it and that, in turn, leads to the inevitable crash of the iPhone.