crash of the iPhone? Perhaps China's dislike for the Taiwan flag

Apparent censorship of Apple allegedly led to an iPhone bug involving the flag emoji of Taiwan.

By the beginning of 2017, iOS would have had a censorship function by changing the location of an iPhone in China – which does not recognize Taiwan as an independent entity – removes emoji from the Taiwanese flag. Any text containing emoji simply displays a "missing" emoji.

But security researcher Patrick Wardle found that sometimes, a bug in the code considered Taiwan's emoji as an invalid entry, rather than as absent from the phone's library, according to Wired. This caused a crash of iPhones.

Wardle informed Apple of the problem and helped the company repair it, which Apple noted in a security update on Monday. The company wrote that "a denial of service problem has been solved with better memory management". Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bug allowed anyone to crash a vulnerable device by simply sending a text message with the Taiwan flag.

Apple would have already taken over the Chinese government, moving data from Chinese Apple users to servers in the country and getting rid of some VPNs from the App Store in China.

In contrast, the company was also involved in an argument with the FBI over encryption in 2016 after refused to unlock the iPhone of a terrorist for enforcement of the law.

"They say 'we are not going to spy on our users', but if China asks, they will build censorship in their devices and will not really talk about it," he said. Wardle told Wired. "Hypocrisy is the term I would use."