Your iPhone Could Crash If You Type These Four Characters

A new iPhone bug has been discovered which can cause your Apple devices to briefly crash if you type in these four characters.

A security researcher discovered this bug and took to social media to inform the users about this. The Mastodon account revealed that typing the characters “”:: into the app library on your iPhone, will cause your device to crash and reboot.

One has to navigate to the App library by swiping left on all the home screen pages on their device. Typing these characters “”:: will crash the Apple mobile user interface, called the iPhone Springboard.

According to TechCrunch, just typing the characters “”: followed by any other character will also crash your device. If the bug is triggered, the iPhone Springboard will crash briefly before reloading to your lock screen. In some cases, the bug caused the screen to turn black for a second.

Typing “”:: – in Spotlight Search on the Home Screen or the App Library search bar causes the iPhone to restart.

The tech news website also found that typing these characters in the search bar of the settings app can also crash your device. The App library remains the main area of problem for almost all versions of iOS as reported by 9to5Mac.

Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher told TechCrunch that it was “not a security bug”.

Previous iOS bugs

In 2020, a similar incident occurred. A text message with characters in the Sindhi language created similar troubles on Apple devices. Certain miscreants put a string of Sindhi language characters on the Telegram app, and when individuals accessed the inbox, the iPhone (& iPads) failed to recognize them and crashed.

A bug in the same year caused the Twitter (now X) app to crash for any user who viewed a tweet containing certain characters.

In 2015, something known as the “Effective Power” bug emerged. When a specific text was received, the Messages app crashed and the iPhone devices rebooted. This was a more serious issue since someone else could send you messages and crash your iPhone repeatedly.

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