Now that iOS has been around for over 17 years, it’s a pretty stable operating system. But a security researcher has managed to find a rare bug that causes iPhones and iPads to crash if you type just four letters.
The researcher known as Constantine on Mastodon (via TechCrunch) discovered that SpringBoard, the app that manages your iPhone’s home screen, crashes if you swipe across all home screens to the App Library and type the following into the search bar: “”::
We found that doing this on an iPhone (running iOS 17.5. 1) did indeed cause our phone to display a spinning wheel of doom for a few seconds, before going back to the lock screen. Typing those four letters, or the alternative “”: followed by any letter, into the Settings app’s search bar also causes that particular app to crash.
There’s no evidence that this bug is a security issue or anything to worry about. We’ve reached out to Apple for a statement and will update this story if we hear back. In our tests, it also doesn’t cause iOS to crash outright. Only SpringBoard and the Settings app seem to be affected.
Still, it’s an intriguing glimpse into the little hidden weaknesses of our otherwise polished iOS devices. We expect Apple to fully address this issue in iOS 18.
Effective power
iPhone bugs like this are fairly rare, but not entirely unheard of. A more serious problem occurred in iMessage in 2015, when a single text message would cause iPhones to crash and shut down completely.
The issue, known as “effective force” (because it was triggered by receiving the message “effective. Force لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ 冗”), prompted Apple to officially respond and release a temporary fix.
That was a more concerning issue because it potentially gave outsiders the power to completely crash your iPhone. This newer one is small beer in comparison, since it’s user-generated and not exactly a sentence many of us would accidentally type.
We also recently saw Apple admit that a “database corruption” in iOS 17.5 was bringing back deleted photos for some iCloud users. That issue has now been patched, though, leaving us free to deliberately make our iPhone laugh by typing this obscure phrase.