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Even popular apps like WhatsApp crash. It happens. There’s one particular problem bugging users currently that we are going to cover in this article. Specifically, the type of crash (could look like a freeze or timeout) that occurs within WhatsApp when a contact sends you a message that the app (or your phone) for whatever reason can’t handle (meaning download, display, display correctly, etc).
Sometimes this is accidental (friend sending you something).
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Sometimes this is purposeful, either as a bad joke or something malicious. For example, someone you don’t know sends you a message, and when you click on the message to try and see who the person is or what the message is, the app crashes. This is why we call it a “Text Bomb.”
The trouble with the app is that just straight up shutting down the app completely, or even restarting your device, won’t fix the issue. Once the message is in progress/process, it is going to want to continue trying to do its thing when you restart the app on your phone.
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This is the curse of apps that are so well connected and are constantly trying to help us get ahead by so very helpfully automatically doing things when we start up the app. It is hard to stop them.
In this case, before you can do anything about the problematic message, the app crashes itself.
There are a few ways that we have been able to successful escape this type of WhatsApp crash.
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Solution #1: Uninstall, and Reinstall WhatsApp
The reason this works is that the chats and chat history are all saved on your device, and not in any sort of cloud. So if you clear the app off your phone (along with that problematic message and chat history), when you reinstall the app and reconnect everything up, the app should work just fine.
This is not the ideal solution if you are in a hurry, or if you have messages in that chat (or others) that you do not want to delete. This may not be a big deal to you if you regularly back up your WhatsApp chats or you pull out the information
Please note that deleting or uninstalling the app on your device is not the same as deleting your WhatsApp account. If you only uninstall and then reinstall the app, you should be able to log in again with your previous WhatsApp account credentials. In that case, while your chat history and messages will not show up again, you should still be connected up to all of your former WhatsApp contacts and friends.
Solution #2: Delete Your WhatsApp Account Along With the App
It shouldn’t be necessary to delete your entire WhatsApp account to address this error. It seems as though it would be an effective way to overcome the crash of the app whenever you log in, as your new account and new credentials wouldn’t contain the contact or chat history with that particular contact.
Solution #3: Access WhatsApp From Another Device
If you can access WhatsApp from another device (such as your web browser), you may be able to either delete the message, the chat history, or even the contact from WhatsApp so that the next time you open it up on the device giving you trouble, that message causing the problems won’t be there to download. From the other device, you should also be able to change your settings to prevent people who are not already in your contacts from sending you messages, and block the bad dude.
However, this doesn’t always work. Thus far, we have seen this work easily in a situation where a user already had a WhatsApp browser session open on their desktop or laptop (not necessarily an open browser window, just already logged in) If you are starting a new session from scratch, WhatsApp will probably try and download the problem message yet again before you have a chance to deal with it.
Will Multidevice Support Help Resolve This Problem?
Historically, to be able to use WhatsApp, we needed to have the app set up on a phone and then actively open to be able to use WhatsApp on other devices (the phone gets the messages and then communicates them to the other device).
WhatsApp is working to add the multidevice option so that people can have the app open and use it on other devices without having to have the phone version of the app doing all of the heavy lifting. Thus, in the event that you are struggling with someone sending you stuff you don’t want that crashes your device, you’d be able to easily log in on another device and deal with the message.
Hopefully, the ability to access the app with our desktop computer independent of the phone would also provide us with another option to deal with this issue, even if it is just another place where old chats can be recovered after an uninstall/reinstall.
Looking to learn more about WhatsApp? Here’s some other recent Geekspie articles: