BUG ALERT! Typing THIS set of characters could lead your iPhone to CRASH
iPhone
A new bug has been identified in Apple iPhones wherein typing a certain set of characters can cause your device to crash. A security researcher on Mastodon revealed the bug on Wednesday. The person found that entering “”:: into yout phone can cause the device to freeze or reboot.
The built-in Home Screen Manager, SpringBoard, crashes when you go past your Home Screen pages to the App Library, and type “”:: in the search bar at the top of the screen. The same happens when you type the characters in the Search bar in the Settings app.
Other users in the comments noted that any character can be used in the fourth place as long as the first three characters are “”:.
A few different types of results were triggered by the characters, as per TechCrunch. In some cases, the bug crashes Springboard for a short time and then reloads to your lock screen. In others, the screen flashes black for a second.
BGR, meanwhile, reported that typing the characters turned the iPhone screen black and showed a loading circle in the middle of the screen. After a few seconds, the lock screen returned. Doing the same in Settings shut down the Settings app.
Other reports suggest that results were different based on iOS versions. On iOS 17, the sequence led to the Home Screen interface crashing and restarting. Meanwhile, Spotlight Search froze on iOS 18 and 18.1 for a brief period but did not crash fully.
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Is new bug a security issue?
Experts say that the bug doesn't seem to be a security issue. “It’s not a security bug,” Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher, told TechCrunch.
For now, no one else other than the owner of the phone can trigger the bug by writing the characters.
In 2020, a similar bug was reported but it could be triggered by others as well. The bug crashed the Twitter app,now X, of every user viewing a tweet with a certain set of characters.
In 2015,the “Effective Power” bug led to the Messages app crashing and devices rebooting when a specific message was received.
Apple is yet to comment on the bug.