The black dot emoji causing WhatApp to Crash on Android
A message has been lately circulating on WhatsApp Messenger which for some weird reasons causes the App to crash when a black dot in the message is tapped on. I believe a lot of people have chanced on this and are amazed about how a single tap on a emoji can cause an App to be unresponsive and crash eventually.
There’s more to this message above than just what the eyes can see, because you would wonder why tapping anywhere else aside from the black spot doesn’t cause the App to crash. The truth of the matter is that there are around two thousands of invisible characters in the message that causes Android’s text rendering engine to be erratic and crashing eventually.
This issue shows up when an abnormal combination of characters triggers a hidden bug in the Android text rendering engine. The two thousand characters switches the text’s orientation back and forth repeatedly in a sequence, and when the engine can’t handle this string of characters, it bolts up and crashes the App.
According to Android Police, the bug is identified with Android’s text rendering engine, so almost any app that displays text is prone to it. However, Chrome seems to be immune to the bug. This is a harmless bug and it won’t cause any data loss, it won’t force your device to reboot, and it won’t prevent you from closing the app and opening it again after freezing.
There’s nothing so special about this black spot emoji, any emoji arranged in similar manner will cause the App to crush – the emoji however needs to be tapped on in order to trigger the bug. See other variations in the images below
Source: Android Police
