Enter these four characters and your iPhone will crash

Apple does an admirable job of squashing serious software bugs before they impact users, but problems still occasionally slip through the net. On Wednesday, a security researcher on Mastodon revealed the existence of a bug in iOS that causes iPhones and iPads to crash when a certain string of characters is entered.

As the researcher notes, if you swipe your home screen pages to the app library, you will find a search bar at the top of the screen. If you type the characters ““:: in this search bar, the built-in home screen manager SpringBoard will crash.

In the comments on the researcher's post, others noted that the fourth character does not have to be a second colon. As long as you type “”: first, SpringBoard will immediately crash if you type a fourth character. TechCrunch also reports that the same error occurs in the Settings app when you scroll up and type the characters into the search bar there.

When I tested the bug in my App Library, my iPhone screen went black and showed a loading circle in the middle of the screen. This lasted for a few seconds before I was sent back to my lock screen. The same test in Settings simply closed the Settings app.

The good news is that it doesn't seem to have any impact on security.

“It's not a security bug,” said Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher TechCrunch.

Unlike other similar bugs that have plagued Apple's mobile operating system in the past, there doesn't seem to be a way to remotely trigger this bug on someone else's device. For now, this seems like little more than a weird quirk of iOS.