For any smartphone user, a phone crash is probably the worst nightmare—one that you want to avoid at all costs. But what if you found out that something as simple as typing a few characters on your phone could cause it to crash?
A new software bug has surfaced that can crash the home screens of iPhones and iPads. However, it mainly affects those curious enough to try it on their own devices.
Web security researcher Konstantin found that the bug is triggered by typing the characters “”:: (two double quotation marks and two colons) in three specific locations on your iPhone, which causes Springboard—the app responsible for running the home screen—to crash.
Your iPhone will reload to the Lock Screen if you swipe past all of the pages on your Home Screen and type the four characters in the search function. Typing the characters into the search bar of the Settings page and App Library will also cause the same problem.
Several social media users claimed that typing just the first three characters would cause the problem to occur. Occasionally, the gadget temporarily flashes a black screen before reloading if the bug has been triggered.
While it appears to be harmless, it’s best to avoid testing it out intentionally, triggering crashes on your expensive devices.
Sounds like a pretty alarming scenario, right? However, this type of problem is most likely linked to a software bug or glitch in the operating system.
In the past, there have been instances where certain character strings, especially those from non-Latin alphabets, could cause unexpected behaviour or crashes due to how they were handled by the system.
Researchers have informed leading technology news website TechCrunch that the bug doesn’t seem to pose any security risks.
As this issue has been discovered, Apple should be able to release a software update to fix the bug as soon as possible. In the meantime, users would need to be cautious about what they type or avoid using specific characters or sequences known to cause the problem.
According to multiple reports, the problem should be resolved and the flaw fixed in the latest iOS update, 17.6.2.