Seemingly innocent link is causing WhatsApp to crash
Remember a few years ago when Apple’s iMessage had some kind of weird bug where if certain characters were sent, it would cause the app to crash? It looks like WhatsApp is now plagued by a similar issue.
This is according to a tweet by Brute Bee on Twitter where they revealed that simply sending the link “wa.me/settings” would cause WhatsApp on Android to crash. It’s kind of weird because prior to this, WhatsApp had no trouble handling links, and now this link which will open WhatsApp’s settings should be the least of WhatsApp’s issues.
https://twitter.com/BruteBee/status/1663169721263431681
We would understand if there were weird/special characters involved that might make the app act up, but this is just a normal link to the WhatsApp’s settings so it shouldn’t have been an issue to begin with. That being said, for now there is a temporary workaround and that is to simply delete the chat with the link.
We know that some of you might not want to delete the chat because it might have meaning or history to you, so the alternative would be to simply access WhatsApp through the web where this problem is non-existent. At the moment it appears to only affect WhatsApp on Android devices, but either way hopefully the folks at Meta will have a fix for it soon.