Following on the heels of the discovery that an Arabic-character text message can crash your iPhone, now there's a bug-causing message that not only crashes the Skype app for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows — it makes the app crash over and over again. And this time, the eight-character string is something you could easily type by accident.
If you type “http://:” into a chat in the Skype app, your recipient’s device will crash without displaying the message — and, if you send it from an iOS, Android, or Windows device (basically, anything except Skype for Mac or Skype for Windows 8.1, from what we can tell), your device will crash, too. You could accidentally enter those characters if you're manually typing out a URL to a friend, or have a copy-and-paste error.
Adding to the problem, once these characters are in your chat history, the app crashes every subsequent time you try to log in.
Luckily, the Skype team quickly addressed the issue. First, it filtered out messages including that string from being sent in the first place. Then this morning, Skype issued a software update which you can download to fix the bug (grab it here). For iOS and Android device owners, you simply need to update the app to get the bug fix.
While these character-based bugs are certainly a bummer, we can at least be thankful that none of them have been caused by emoji. Ceasing our use of the winky face, cheers-ing mugs, or eggplant is just too much to imagine.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT