Apple does an admirable job of stamping out significant software bugs before they impact users, but issues do still occasionally slip through the cracks. On Wednesday, a security researcher on Mastodon revealed the existence of a bug in iOS that causes iPhones and iPads to crash when typing in a specific set of characters.
As the researcher notes, if you swipe past your Home Screen pages to the App Library, you will find a search bar at the top of the screen. Typing the characters “”:: into that search bar will then cause the built-in Home Screen manager, SpringBoard, to crash.
In the comments of the researcher’s post, others noted that the fourth character doesn’t have to be a second colon. As long as you type “”: in first, SpringBoard will immediately crash when you type in a fourth character. TechCrunch also reports that the same bug is present in the Settings app if you scroll up and type the characters in the search bar there.
When I tested the bug in my App Library, my iPhone screen turned black and showed a loading circle in the middle of the screen. It lasted for a few seconds before I was sent back to my Lock Screen. The same test in Settings simply closed the Settings app.
The good news is that it doesn’t appear to have any impact on security.
“It’s not a security bug,” Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher, told TechCrunch.
Unlike other similar bugs that have plagued Apple’s mobile operating system in the past, there doesn’t appear to be a way to remotely trigger this bug on someone else’s device. For now, this seems to be little more than a weird quirk in iOS.
