iPhone Owners Beware, Typing These Characters Can Crash Your iOS Device
A strange bug has been found impacting iPhones. It appears iOS is susceptible to experiencing a crash of the user interface, Springboard, when a user types in “”: followed by a fourth character. The bug was first shared in a post on social media platform X by user @Kmokhtar79, who said, “it seems there is a bug on iOS17.6.1.” The finding was later confirmed in a thread on the infosec.exchange Mastodon instance. We've also confirmed that it exists, having successfully crashed an older iPhone XS Max.
The crash is triggered when a user types in the set of four characters into the search bar found in the home screen, the App Library, or in the Settings app. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely anyone using iOS will ever run into this bug, unless autocorrect happens to go rogue.
Thankfully, this bug discovered by @Kmokhtar79 and confirmed on Mastadon (as well as ourselves) only triggered when a user engages in a very specific behavior, making it less of a concern for iPhone users. It’s a far cry from prior text-based bugs the iPhone has experienced in the past, where in some situations simply receiving a text message could cause an app or the entire iPhone to crash.
Even though this bug isn’t likely to cause a problem for many users, hopefully Apple is able to address the issue in a future iOS update.
