Apple Working To Fix Serious 9.3 bug

By Eshvinder Chhabra 

Apple has acknowledged an issue with Safari and other apps which forces them to crash when opening a link in iOS 9 and above. Apple assured us that it will resolve the issue with a software update soon. Over the weekend, several users started to complain of issues when pressing a link whilst using Safari and other apps was causing them to crash. Apple, in a statement to 9to5Mac, noted that they are "aware of this issue and will release a fix in a software update soon."
According to posts on Apple's Support website, when users press on links in Safari, Mail, Messages, Notes, Chrome and other apps, they just freeze and crash. While Apple hasn't disclosed what is causing the issue, many believe that it has something to do with Universal Links, which Apple first introduced in iOS 9. Universal Links allows an app to handle links natively instead of relying on Safari. Apple allows developers to register domain names that they want to open in the app. The bottleneck lies in how these apps utilise this feature, as a user points out, as some apps such as Booking.com abuse the feature. In the case of the Booking.com app, the developers behind it had stuffed 2.4MB worth of domain-name-to-deep-link entries. This apparently makes the Universal Link database too clunky, causing it to crash.
Apple should release a fix for this in the coming days. The company is hard at work with squashing bugs in its mobile operating system. Earlier this week, it released a new build for iOS 9.3 that comes with a fix for users that faced an activation lock issue when trying to update their older iOS devices to iOS 9.3 which was released last week.