A newly discovered odd character bug can cause your iPhones and iPads to briefly crash. This bug is triggered by typing just four characters on your iOS device. On Wednesday, a security researcher found that typing “”:: characters in the App Library or Settings app can cause the iPhone’s home screen interface, Springboard to crash.
As pointed out by TechCrunch, you only need to type “”: followed by any fourth character to trigger the bug. So, it’s something related to the first three characters of the string. According to iOS security researchers, 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.”
We tested it on multiple iPhones running iOS 17 and iOS 18 beta. On iOS 17, typing these characters in the Settings app search field will cause the app to crash. In the App Library, these four characters crashed the Springboard and showed a black screen for 1-2 seconds. However, typing these characters in the Spotlight search didn’t have any impact. On iOS 18, the characters didn’t do a respring. However, they just closed the Settings app in a fraction and opened it back as usual. Also, the Spotlight search did freeze very briefly, but there was no crash.
It’s worth knowing that this crash or respring is not a full reset, so it won’t delete your data. Your iPhone will take a few seconds to be functional again. Also, it doesn’t seem to affect any app or feature on your iPhone or iPad. So, it’s not as big of a problem as some older character bugs that spread through Messages and let people repeatedly crash other users’ iPhones. Talking about this bug, users will rarely enter “”:: on their iPhones or iPads, unless they are doing it purposely.
Apple hasn’t commented on this character bug yet. If the issue becomes widespread, Apple will hopefully address it with an iOS update in the near future.
