WhatsApp is inarguably the most popular instant messaging app on this planet right now. After all, it’s being used by a whopping 450 Million users daily. Almost everyone who owns a smartphone has WhatsApp installed on it. WhatsApp users send billions of messages every day – such as some inspirational “Good Morning” messages, or some trolls on celebrities. We can only imagine the kind of messages that are exchanged around through WhatsApp. However, one message that’s been circulating on WhatsApp has drawn some attention, and not for good reasons.
This message (see image above) that says “If you touch the black point then your whatsapp will hang” has been doing rounds on WhatsApp. Well, according to this message, if a user touches the black spot (or Black Dot) that’s included in the message, his WhatsApp will “hang”.
Now this isn’t fake, there are several users who are reporting of WhatsApp crash when they touch this Black Dot. Well, this isn’t some “Black Magic with Black Dot” kinda thing after all. In fact, that Black Dot isn’t even the reason why your WhatsApp crashes. The main culprit here is the blank space after the Black Dot.
Touching the Black Dot may not freeze your WhatsApp, but touching the blank space after it could.
Well, when you convert this message into HTML (or Unicode), you will find RLM (right-to-left mark). This is an invisible directional formatting character that (along with LRM) is used to distinguish between left-to-right text (like English and Hindi) and right-to-left text (like Arabic and Hebrew).
Now when we use English language text, the directional formatting character that’s used is LRM (left-to-right mark), however, in this WhatsApp message, RLM is used. This character is used when you are dealing with Urdu language that’s written from right to left, instead of left to right, like English.
Well, as the wrong directional formatting character is used here, it’s instructing WhatsApp to change the direction from left-to-right to right-to-left, which overwhelms the app and ultimately leads to app crash. This change of direction uses a lot of processing power, so if you are using an older or a lower-end Android smartphone, your WhatsApp might freeze for a while.
We tried this out on our OnePlus 5, but we didn’t notice even a second’s worth of lag. That being said, only Android users need to worry about this, as iOS users aren’t marred with this issue. At least we haven’t come across any such reports from iOS users at press time.
Having said that, WhatsApp isn’t the only app that crashes with this Black Dot message. Some users on Reddit are reporting that apps other than WhatsApp are also crashing when they touch the blank space after the Black Dot in the message.
If you too receive this message, it’s better you stay away from touching it and just delete it. But, if you want to piss off your friends and cousins, then go ahead and forward it to them and make sure they touch the blank space.
