Huh.
Shady Characters
Beware, iPhone users. There is — once again — a very silly bug in iOS that causes your device to crash when you type a string of seemingly random characters.
If for whatever reason you wanted to freeze up your phone, all you'd have to do is punch “”:: into the search bar of the Settings app, or into the search bar of your App Library, which can be reached by swiping all the way to the right on your home screen.
This crashes the iPhone's Springboard — the app that controls the home screen — and closes the Settings menu before sending you back to the lock screen.
The bizarre bug was shared Wednesday by a security researcher on Mastodon, and was verified by TechCrunch.
According to 9to5Mac, it affects iPhones running the latest version of iOS 17, and the beta builds of iOS 18 and iOS 18.1, though it's possible that other versions could be affected as well.
Harmless, Dumb
Fortunately, there don't appear to be any real risks posed by the glitch — it's just a neat trick.
"It's not a security bug," said Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the bug, told TechCrunch.
And so far, it seems it can only be triggered by the person using the device, unlike similar "text bomb" bugs in years past that could crash anyone's phone just by sending them a message or Tweet that contained problematic characters.
In this recent case, what appears to be happening is that the characters are triggering a "Respring," which is more or less a simple restart of SpringBoard — or basically a faster way of refreshing your phone without doing a full reboot.
One iOS developer suggested in response to the original Mastodon post that — and this is not official technical advice — the bug is "actually a pretty useful feature." Huh.
That being said, unless you really know what you're doing, you probably shouldn't mess around with this.
More on weird smartphone glitches: Watching This "Alien" Video Is Crashing Pixel Phones
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