Here’s a neat party trick: Take someone’s iPhone, type out four characters, and watch as their iPhone crashes. (Maybe your friends won’t think it’s so neat.)
However people react, this trick is made possible due to a newly discovered bug on iPhones and iPads. Hacker and security tester Konstantin posted about the crash on the Mastodon instance Infosec Exchange, saying they found the discovery “somewhere on the bird site.” (X, of course.)
The four characters in question are “”::, two quotation marks, followed by two colons. That said, it appears only the first three characters are necessary for iOS and iPadOS to crash, as any fourth character will trigger the glitch.
You won’t crash your iPhone typing these characters just anywhere, however: You need to type them out in a specific search field. Konstantin says it works with your iPhone or iPad’s App Library search field, which you can get to by swiping left through your Home Screen pages. However, I’ve also found it works in the search field in Settings: The difference is, the glitch crashes just the Settings app, while using it in App Library forces SpringBoard, iOS’ Home Screen application, to fully restart.
9to5Mac also finds the crash works with Spotlight Search on iPhones and iPads running iOS 18.1, which is currently in beta testing.
While Apple has not publicly commented on the bug, the good news is it doesn’t appear to be harmful, nor is it a security vulnerability. That’s what iOS security researcher Ryan Stortz tells TechCrunch. So, while it is weird, it doesn’t seem to be something to worry about. Apple will likely patch the bug with a future version of iOS and iPadOS, and that will be the end of that.
This is far from the first bug of its kind to pop up on iOS. Past bugs have even caused iPhones to crash without any intervention from users. That was the case with a glitch in 2015, where the Messages app would continue to crash if the user received a specific text.
