New iOS Bug: Four Characters Can Crash iPhone

A recent iOS glitch has been discovered where typing four specific characters causes an iPhone to temporarily crash before returning to its normal functioning.

A security researcher has disclosed on Mastodon that if you enter the characters “”: (two quotation marks, followed by two colons) into either Spotlight Search or App Library, it will cause your iPhone to crash.

After entering the characters in the search bar of the Settings app on an iPhone 14 Pro with iOS 17.5.1, the app immediately crashed and returned us to the home screen. Furthermore, simply typing “”: followed by any fourth character has the potential to crash the iPhone.

After investigating the issue, the security researcher did not disclose the cause of the crash. According to other researchers interviewed by TechCrunch, the bug is not a security threat. Ryan Stortz, an iOS security expert who analyzed the bug, stated that it is not a security vulnerability. Patrick Wardle, another iOS researcher, concurred with this assessment.

Currently, there is no proof indicating that anyone other than the owner of an iOS device, who manually types these characters, can cause the bug to occur.

Apple has not yet responded to this discovery, however, the company is known for promptly addressing issues like this through an iOS update. We have contacted Apple for a statement and will update the article upon receiving a response.

The iOS bug is not very concerning as it is unlikely that you would ever encounter a situation where you need to type “”: during regular use. However, a butt dial is one of the few instances where this could potentially cause a problem, although the likelihood of this happening is minimal.