Typing these four characters causes iPhones to crash

Suspicious characters

iPhone users, beware. There’s — once again — a really stupid bug in iOS that causes your device to freeze when you type in a string of seemingly random characters.

If for some reason you want to freeze your phone, just type “”:: in the search bar in the Settings app or in the App Library search bar, which you can access by swiping right on the home screen.

This will crash the Springboard app on your iPhone that controls the Home screen, closing the Settings menu, and returning you to the Lock screen.

The strange bug was reported Wednesday by a security researcher at Mastodon, and was verified by TechCrunch.

According to 9to5MacThis affects iPhones running the latest version of iOS 17 and beta versions of iOS 18 and iOS 18.1, although it’s possible that other versions may be affected as well.

Harmless, stupid

Fortunately, this bug carries no real risk — it’s just a clever trick.

“This is not a security bug,” said Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the bug. TechCrunch.

So far, it appears that only the person using the device can trigger it, unlike similar “text bombs” from years past that could crash the phone of anyone sent a message or tweet containing the problematic characters.

In the latter case, the characters appear to trigger a “Respring,” which is more or less a simple SpringBoard reboot — or just a quicker way to refresh your phone without having to do a full restart.

One iOS Developer suggested in response to Mastodon’s original post, which — and this is NO official tech advisory — the bug is “actually a pretty useful feature.” Huh.

That said, if you really don’t know what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t bother.

More on weird smartphone glitches: Watching This Alien Movie Crashes Pixel Phones