I ruined my iPhone with these four characters so you don’t have to

TechnologyCrunch I initially noticed this strange operating system bug, but fortunately it doesn’t seem to pose a security risk. Only iPhone users can exploit it to screw themselves over.

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Earlier this week, Konstantin, a security researcher and lead pentester at German security firm USD AGpublished on exchange of information details of an iOS bug that causes Springboard (the app that manages the iPhone’s home screen) to crash.

As others As noted in the InfoSec thread, this works by typing “”: followed by any other character. Konstantin then expanded on the first post to explain that any string of characters following the regular expression pattern ^”.*”:. triggers the block.

ZDNET verified that typing those characters into the Settings app’s search bar on an iPhone running iOS 17 causes Springboard to crash. It also causes the phone to crash when they’re entered into the App Library’s search bar and returns you to the lock screen when Springboard restarts.

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On iPhones running iOS 18 beta, this causes Settings to crash and the iPhone to return to the Home screen, but it doesn’t appear to have any effect on the App Library.

There is no evidence that this can be used for any malicious activity and it only causes crashes when users manually type characters into search boxes.

There has been no word from Apple on this issue yet, but we can likely expect a fix in the next batch of iOS updates.