iOS bug causes iPhone to crash when you type these four characters

Occasionally, an odd text string bug emerges in iOS that can crash your iPhone with just a few characters. This week, a security researcher on Mastodon found that typing these characters into Spotlight Search or App Library will crash your iPhone: “”::

As TechCrunch points out, you actually only need to type “”: followed by any fourth character to cause the crash. Researchers further explained that this is not a security issue and there’s “no evidence yet to suggest anyone other than an iOS device owner manually typing the characters could trigger this bug.”

9to5Mac tested this on multiple iPhones and multiple iOS versions. With the latest version of iOS 17, typing these characters causes Springboard—the iPhone Home Screen interface—to crash and “soft” reboot.

Typing these characters with iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 causes Spotlight Search to freeze very briefly, but Springboard does not fully crash.

The problem only affects typing in Spotlight Search from your iPhone’s Home Screen or the App Library search bar.

This is far from the first time a text string bug like this has affected the iPhone. Perhaps most notably, the “Effective Power” bug in 2015 caused the Messages app to crash and iPhones to reboot when a particular text was received. This was a more severe problem because someone else could send you the message and repeatedly crash your iPhone.

Apple hasn’t commented on this week’s discovery, but the company is usually pretty quick to fix problems like this with an iOS update. And of course, it’s not like anyone is purposefully typing “”:: on a regular basis.

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