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Ask HN: I found a fun bug in Messages for macOS. Can anyone else replicate this?

1 points by redundantly ↗ HN
In the Messages app I can edit other people's messages by:

1. Manually selecting a portion (or all) text in a message.

2. CMD+tab out of Messages and then back into it

3. Start typing

I am running Messages Version 14.0 (6000) and macOS 13.4.1 (22F82).

The edits are temporary. If I change conversations and go back the real messages return. Sometimes it takes tabbing away and back in twice for it to be permitted.

An example (expires in two days):

* https://streamable.com/1okjdm

I checked with a few people, no one else is able to replicate this behaviour. Anyone else?

3 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 19.8 ms ] thread
necovek
As with any bug report, you should report exact software version numbers to help others reproduce it, and especially if you are using some other focus/key stealing apps (eg password managers, karabiner for key rebindings...)..
redundantly
I added my versions to the original post.

I went into accessiblity settings and turned off the ability for an auto clicker to control my computer and I can no longer re-produce the message editing. However, when I turned that setting back on I it didn't re-enable the behaviour, so I don't believe it was that app itself.

Perhaps something to do with macOS accessibility in general?

necovek
Yeah, sounds like a combination of things: a11y allows introspection of the widgets, and perhaps received messages are rendered by an editable widget that's "emulated" to be read-only (ie most events caught to make it non-editable, but a11y goes direct to the properties).

Since you can't reproduce it, sounds like an inconsistency in startup too. Perhaps worth trying to kill the Messages app and restart it with a11y reenabled?

You should probably report the bug anyway, it might be an easy and obvious fix for someone with access to the source code, yet hard to figure out a reproducible test case for an outsider.