In what will probably be an urgent patch for Apple very, very shortly, you can temporarily crash any iPhone using punctuation. Fun.
You can’t escape the fact that technology in our lives has bugs, though some are clearly much worse than others.
For iPhone users, a new bug is a bit of a nuisance if you come across it, though early tests put it as completely harmless if you try it.
Simply put, if someone asks you to enter two quotation marks, a colon, and anything else — it could be a semi-colon or a letter or a number of whatever — into the settings search screen, they’re asking you to check out a bug affecting iOS right now that crashes what you’re doing and sends you back to the home screen.
Specifically, it could look like this:
"":;In fact, it could look like the first part of that with any other character after, and still trigger the issue. You can also enter it outside of the search screen on Settings, and throw it into the app search screen on an iPhone’s left most screen to have the same bug fire up.
We’ve demonstrated the bug in the below example tested on an iPhone 15 Pro Max before this story was published:
A researcher part of a Mastodon cyber security group found the bug which affects the system that manages Apple’s home screen system, Springboard, and has since been confirmed to run with other characters, too.
In one instance we tested with, the four characters went back to the home screen on our iPad Pro, but then several minutes later crashed to a black screen before needing to be brought back using the tablet’s power button. On the iPhone, the crash was minor, just sending us back to home every time we triggered it.
In short, the iPhone four character crash bug is more of an annoyance than a hinderance, but still the sort of thing you might want to be aware of. It very much comes with a warning of “use at your own risk”, because while we’ve not seen any lasting damage or consequences, it doesn’t mean every experience will end up being the same.
As such, we expect Apple will have a patch for this bug very soon, though that does mean you can also expect the bug to sit around for a few days or weeks before that happens.
