A bug in the iPhone Messages app prevents the sending of voice messages and the transcription of received voice messages when they are accompanied by a fairly common special character. Apple should quickly provide a fix.
Apple has been pushing iOS 18.5 since Monday, which fixes several bugs in addition to optimizing performance. Except that the company apparently forgot one, discovered somewhat by chance during the recording of an episode of The Search Engine Podcast.
They realized that sending a voice message containing the phrase “Dave and Buster”doesn’t really work. The message appeared in the sender’s messages. But on the recipient’s side, nothing – no message.
Messages on iPhone clearly doesn’t like brands with an “&”
Instead, the three dots indicating that the caller is typing something remain displayed indefinitely. At first, it seemed difficult to find any explanation for this behavior, which seemed to be linked to a completely arbitrary word.
However, developer Guilherme Rambo (via MacRumors) finally found the reason for the problem. It is actually caused by the automatic transcription of these messages by the iPhone, and by a fault in escaping the & character. The AI that transforms voice messages into text understands branding.
When a brand containing an “&” is detected, it automatically replaces “and” with this character. This is what happens with brands like Dave & Buster's or H&M, among other examples. The real bug occurs because messages are managed in XHTML and that this character is always considered, when not accompanied by an escape method, as a special character.
The security on the recipient's phone sees a message that looks like malware, and triggers its anti-malware agent Blastdoor. This blocks the message from arriving. Nothing really critical in this problem which does not seem possible to exploit, for the moment, as would be a real security flaw.
But it can obviously prove annoying in certain cases. To avoid the problem, you have no other choice for the moment than to no longer speak of brands and other words with an “&” in their name. Or to do without voice messages while waiting for a patch,
0 Comments