These Four Characters Will (Briefly) Break Your IPhone
Here’s a neat party trick: take someone’s iPhone, type four characters, and watch their iPhone crash. (Your friends might not think it’s so neat.)
Regardless of how people react, this trick is made possible by a recently discovered bug on the iPhone and iPad. Hacker and security tester Constantine posted a glitch on an instance of Mastodon Infosec Exchange , saying they found the discovery “somewhere on a bird site.” (X, of course.)
The four characters in question are “”::” , two quotation marks, followed by two colons. However, it appears that only the first three characters are needed for iOS and iPadOS to crash, as any fourth character will cause the crash.
However, you won’t break your iPhone by typing these characters anywhere: you need to enter them into a specific search field. Constantine says this works with the search field in your iPhone or iPad’s app library, which you can access by swiping left across Home screen pages. However, I also found that this works in the search box in Settings: the difference is that only the Settings app crashes due to the glitch, while using it in the App Library results in a complete restart of SpringBoard, the iOS Home Screen app .
9to5Mac also discovered that the glitch works in Spotlight search on iPhones and iPads running iOS 18.1, which is currently in beta .
Although Apple has not publicly commented on this bug, the good news is that it is neither dangerous nor a security vulnerability. Here’s what iOS security researcher Ryan Stortz told TechCrunch . So, although it’s strange, it doesn’t seem like anything to worry about. Apple will likely fix the bug in future versions of iOS and iPadOS, and that will be the end of it.
This is not the first error of this kind to appear on iOS. Past bugs have even caused iPhones to crash without any intervention from users. This was the case in 2015 , when the Messages app kept crashing if the user received a certain text.