Your iPhones and iPads may briefly crash due to a recently found strange character problem. Just four characters on your iOS device will cause this problem to occur. A security researcher discovered on Wednesday that the iPhone’s Springboard home screen interface can crash when inputting the letters “”:: in the App Library or Settings app.
TechCrunch noted that all it takes to activate the issue is to type “”: followed by any other character. It therefore has to do with the string’s initial three characters. This is not a security vulnerability, and “no evidence yet to suggest anyone other than an iOS device owner manually typing the characters could trigger this bug,” said iOS security researchers.
We tested it on several iPhones running the beta versions of iOS 17 and 18. On iOS 17, the Settings app will crash if you type these characters in the search area. These four characters in the App Library caused the Springboard to crash and displayed a black screen for one to two seconds. But entering these characters using the Spotlight search produced no results. The characters in iOS 18 did not respring. But in a short while, they just closed the Settings app and reopened it. Additionally, there was no crash, but there was a momentary freezing of the Spotlight search.
It’s important to understand that your data won’t be erased because this crash or respring is not a complete reset. It will take a few seconds for your iPhone to start working again. Additionally, it doesn’t appear to have an impact on any iPad or iPhone apps or features. Therefore, it’s not as serious of an issue as certain previous character issues that were propagated through Messages and allowed users to continually crash the iPhones of other users. In reference to this problem, users of iPhones and iPads hardly ever enter “”:: unless they do so on purpose.
Apple has yet to provide a statement regarding this character problem. Apple should release an iOS update soon to remedy the problem if it spreads widely.
