Weird text-related bugs aren’t new to iOS, but they’re still making an impact. This time, a security researcher on Mastodon discovered that entering certain characters into Spotlight search or the App Library can cause the iPhone to crash. Here are the characters in question: “”::
Characters to avoid
In fact, just type “”: followed by any fourth character in Spotlight to cause the phone to crash. But don’t panic, this does nothing to the iPhone and there is no security threat, since only the owner can do it.
If you are on iOS 17, you will then see the iPhone do a quick reboot, a respring for jailbreak fans which relaunches the entire home screen (Springboard). If you are already on iOS 18, this will trigger a simple “reload” of the search function.
This bug only affects typing in Spotlight search on the Home screen or in the App Library search bar.
Yet another bug
The most diligent among you probably remember similar old problems. One of the most striking examples is the bug “Effective Power” in 2015, which caused the Messages app to crash and iPhones to reboot when a certain text string was received. A more serious issue than today’s, since it was triggered by an external message.
Apple has not responded, but the company usually fixes this type of problem quickly with an iOS update. But who is typing “”: in research anyway? This looks more like poor management of regex than anything else…