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Now that that it's been around for over 17 years, iOS is a pretty stable operating system – but a security researcher has managed to find a rare bug that causes iPhones and iPads to crash with the typing of just four letters.
The researcher known as Konstantin on Mastodon (via TechCrunch) discovered that SpringBoard, the app that manages your iPhone home screen, will crash if you swipe right past all of your home screens to the App Library and type the following into the search bar: ""::
We found that doing this on an iPhone (running iOS 17.5.1) indeed made our phone display a spinning wheel of doom for several seconds, before it returned to its lock screen. Typing those four letters, or the alternative "": followed by any letter, into the Settings app's search bar also makes that particular app crash.
There's no evidence that this bug is a security issue or anything to worry about – we've contacted Apple for a statement and will update this story if we hear back. In our tests, it also doesn't cause iOS to fully crash – only SpringBoard and the Settings app appear to be affected.
Still, it's an intriguing glimpse into the little hidden weak spots of our otherwise polished iOS devices – and we expect Apple will fully resolve the niggle in iOS 18.
Effective power
iPhone bugs like this are pretty rare, but not completely unheard of. A more serious one emerged on iMessage back in 2015, when a single text message caused iPhones to crash and fully shut down.
Known as 'effective power' (because it was triggered by receiving the message "effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗"), the problem prompted Apple to officially respond and release a temporary fix.
That was a more worrying issue because it potentially gave outsiders the power to fully crash your iPhone. This newer one is small fry by comparison because it's user-generated and isn't exactly a phrase many of us will type in by accident.
We did also recently see Apple admit that a "database corruption" in iOS 17.5 was bringing back deleted photographs for some iCloud users. That problem has now been patched, though, leaving us free to willfully prod our iPhone's funny bone by typing in this obscure phrase.