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.
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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.
