Looking for a little excitement? Head on over to the App Library on your iPhone and try typing “”:: into the search bar. Surprise! You’ve just caused your iPhone to crash temporarily. But fear not, as security researchers assure us that it’s not a permanent or serious issue.
A Mastodon user named Konstantin discovered that entering those four characters into the search bar triggers a crash in SpringBoard, the app that manages the iPhone home screen. It briefly loops the phone before returning you to the lock screen without closing any apps or causing any other problems. It’s more of a reset than anything else. I personally tested it on my device and didn’t notice any unusual behavior.
This glitch was observed on an iPhone running iOS 17.5.1, but some colleagues at Digital Trends have reported that it doesn’t work on their devices running the iOS 18 beta. It also appears to only work when entered into the App Library; using the search bar by swiping down doesn’t produce the same effect. Interestingly, typing the same characters in the search bar of the Settings app does trigger the crash. Strange, isn’t it?
Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher, explained to TechCrunch that “It’s not a security bug.” There’s no need to worry about it leading to unauthorized access by malicious entities, and the likelihood of someone other than you (or someone using your phone) triggering it is low. Most likely, it’s an overlooked internal bug that will be addressed in a future iOS update.
Other users have found that simply typing “”: along with any other character can also trigger the glitch with the same outcome. There’s no real benefit or harm in doing so, but it’s an interesting find in an operating system with a long history.
Apple has yet to respond to inquiries from TechCrunch regarding this issue. This isn’t the first time such a bug has surfaced; in 2015, an iMessage bug had the ability to crash and shut down iPhones with a single text.
Fortunately, this current glitch isn’t likely to cause any significant problems, especially since those specific characters wouldn’t typically be typed into a search bar under normal circumstances (though someone might make an app named “”:: just for fun).
