Apple iPhone Has The Weirdest New Bug: Don't Send These iMessages

Forbes

14-05-2025

A problem has arisen in the iPhone and there are some things you can't quite say when you're sending an iMessage. If you do, it'll refuse to send the voice message.
The iPhone's Messages app
Imagine, if you will, the scene: you're dictating an audio message into your iPhone Messages app. 'I've just spilled Ben & Jerry's down my Dolce & Gabbana shirt. I can't afford another, I'm going to H&M for an emergency t-shirt. Let's meet at Dave & Buster's,' you say.
You press send and all looks good at your end. Problem is, the recipient will never see it, and you may have a quiet night at Dave & Buster's waiting for them to appear.
In fact, if you could see the other phone you'd spot it doing something a bit weird, with the typing indicator on their iPhone flashing at a crazily high speed as though it was about to have a nervous breakdown. Then it would stop, with no message appearing.
It's all down to the ampersand, the one between Ben & Jerry's and the other brand names mentioned above. The issue was first spotted on the podcast Search Engine in the episode titled 'The Dave and Busters Anomaly,' named after the sports bar and restaurant chain whose title can't be transmitted. As the iPhone begins to transcribe the voice message, that's when the problem occurs.
App developer Guilherme Rambo also investigated the issue and found the same thing. Rambo's explanation of the curiosity goes like this.
'When you send an audio message using the Messages app, the message includes a transcription of the audio. If you happen to pronounce the name 'Dave and Buster's' as someone would normally pronounce it, almost like it's a single word, the transcription engine on iOS will recognize the brand name and correctly write it as 'Dave & Buster's' (with an ampersand),' he begins. So far, so good.
But there's more. 'HTML is a markup language, it uses different tags to indicate to a browser or some other program how to interpret the contents of a message. XHTML is a stricter version of HTML that's based on XML and allows custom tags, as long as the document is compatible with the XML standard. The ampersand symbol has special meaning in HTML/XHTML. It's used to indicate special characters that would normally be interpreted as code. For example, a paragraph in HTML is represented with ,' Rambo explains.
And, as MacRumors puts it: 'The parsing error triggers Apple's BlastDoor Messages feature that protects users from malicious messages that might rely on problematic parsing, so ultimately, the audio message fails to send.'
Until the bug is fixed, maybe choose different brands to mention (Haagen Dazs, J Crew, Uniqlo and McDonald's, maybe?).