Sometimes, an odd textual content string bug emerges in iOS that may crash your iPhone with just some characters. This week, a safety researcher on Mastodon discovered that typing these characters into Highlight Search or App Library will crash your iPhone: “”::
As TechCrunch factors out, you really solely must sort “”: adopted by any fourth character to trigger the crash. Researchers additional defined that this isn’t a safety problem and there’s “no proof but to recommend anybody apart from an iOS machine proprietor manually typing the characters may set off this bug.”
9to5Mac examined this on a number of iPhones and a number of iOS variations. With the most recent model of iOS 17, typing these characters causes Springboard—the iPhone House Display screen interface—to crash and “smooth” reboot.
Typing these characters with iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 causes Highlight Search to freeze very briefly, however Springboard doesn’t absolutely crash.
The issue solely impacts typing in Highlight Search out of your iPhone’s House Display screen or the App Library search bar.
That is removed from the primary time a textual content string bug like this has affected the iPhone. Maybe most notably, the “Efficient Energy” bug in 2015 triggered the Messages app to crash and iPhones to reboot when a specific textual content was obtained. This was a extra extreme downside as a result of another person may ship you the message and repeatedly crash your iPhone.
Apple hasn’t commented on this week’s discovery, however the firm is normally fairly fast to repair issues like this with an iOS replace. And naturally, it’s not like anybody is purposefully typing “”:: frequently.
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