If you’re building an iOS app and using a UIWebView control to load web pages or HTML, you may have encountered an issue where the app seems to crash randomly while loading the HTML. We found that the crashes were more frequent when loading external web pages within our apps. This was a difficult issue to debug as you don’t get much information out of the crash other than a BAD_ACCESS message.
It turns out that the issue is related to a bug in the iOS SDK (at least pre SDK 5.0). If you have enabled any of the following you may be subject to this bug which we suspect is a general parsing error:
- Phone Number Detection
- Links Detection
- Events Detection
- Addresses Detection
To correct this issue and save your sanity, disable all of these features as shown below: