Posted on 03/31/2016 10:53:08 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Well that was quick. A couple of days after a bug affecting iOS started making the news, Apple has released a fix. iOS 9.3.1, now available on the iPhone and iPad, fixes this bug. The changelog is quite short as theres only one item. Fixes an issue that caused apps to be unresponsive after tapping on links in Safari and other apps, it says.
As a reminder, many users reported on Apples forums that Safari or any other app would crash if they tapped on a link. It turns out some third-party app developers started abusing an iOS 9 feature, universal links. The bug wasnt just affecting iOS 9.3, it was also affecting users on older versions of iOS 9.
With iOS 9, Apple introduced Universal Links, a brand new way to handle links with native apps. App developers, such as YouTube, can register domain names to open web links directly into an app, bypassing Safari.
Thats why when you click on a youtube.com/somethingsomething
link, iOS opens the YouTube app instead of loading a web page in Safari. This is a nifty feature, except when app developers abuse it.
But some developers, such as Booking.com, associated their apps with all sorts of domains too many domains to be precise. With 2.4MB worth of domain-name-to-deep-link entries in the Booking.com app, the swcd process that checks universal links was overflown. In other words, Apple didnt put a limit on universal links and some app developers abused it.
Its good to see Apple reacting so quickly. But this bug also shows that universal links are still a young technology and Apple still has some work to do to optimize them. If you encountered this bug, head over to the Settings app on your iOS device. Then go to General > Software Update and update your device.
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My new iPad Pro should arrive later this morning. Nice that there’s a new update I can go straight to :)
Part of the fix should involve blocking the app developers who abused the flaw.
I ran into this using Mercury browser in the iPad. Glad they caught it.
I have experienced this intermittently of late on my iPad Air 2.
Google search->tap link->nothing.
Never associated it with 9.3. I would either refresh the page or close Safari and begin again.
LOL, I thought my screen was dirty or my finger was not hitting the right spot. Updating now. :)
We had a few calls here at the Help Desk about the last update when it did not work.
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