Bizarre Apple Bug

Howard, I'd be curious if you can hazard a guess of what caused this bug in the previous version of iOS:

Quote :

IOS 11.2.5 had a significant vulnerability. Spotted by Italian blog Mobile World, all any user needed to do is send a specific character in the Indian language Telugu to another user's iPhone or iPad via Message (character withheld for obvious reasons) and the device would immediately crash. More than that, on restart users will be unable to open the Messages app again.

Interestingly the problem doesn’t affect previous versions of iOS.

There is a hack to help affected users: get someone you trust to send you an ordinary message and the Messages app should reopen again. This will allow you to then delete the damaging message. This is not a permanent fix, however, and you’ll have to do this every time a mischievous friend (or anyone worse) sends you the Indian language character.

I have to imagine every language character is an ASCII value. So why would an ASCII character act like a time bomb?

This explains it, somewhat.

Apple fixes that “1 character to crash your Mac and iPhone” bug

I don't have to guess. It's simply bad programming.