A new mysterious bug found on the WhatsApp is causing the app to crash, it is the black dot emoji that when touched crashes or freezes the app. It is not tapping the emoji that causes the crash as much as what lies underneath it, meaning that tapping anywhere on the message; “<⚫> 👈🏻 can’t touch this” can trigger the bug.
The fact behind this is that there are around two thousand invisible characters in the message that ends up causing Android’s text rendering engine to crash, especially on older devices. While some modern phones recover after freezing. The invisible part of the message has special characters which Unicode uses to specify whether the text need to be written right-to-left or left-to-right and sometimes these characters are needed to properly display text in languages that are written right-to-left, such as Hebrew and Arabic.
Modern devices have been able to handle LTR and RTL texts even within same sentences, but the issue only shows up when a strange combination of characters trigger a bug in the rendering engine which is what that is happening now. The sequence of two thousand characters switches the text’s orientation back and forth repeatedly, but when the engine fails to handle the string behind the character it crashes the app. While Android can display the characters, it crashes when the user tries to tap the message.
Now as you can tell, the bug is not related to WhatsApp per say, it is related to Android’s text rendering engine, so any app that displays the said text is vulnerable to it. So, end of the day the bug is harmless, won’t cause any data loss. Also, any other emoji works just as well. Obviously, Google will most likely release a fix to address the issue and in the meantime, we advise you do not tap on suspicious messages.