First reported by TechCrunch, a mobile security researcher has discovered that you can crash the iPhone interface by typing four characters into the search box.
Simply swipe to the App Library and type ” ” :: in the search box (that’s two double quotes and two colons). The iPhone interface will reset. Other testers have clarified that you only need to enter the first three characters, then the fourth character can be anything.
This is a kind of “software crash.” It’s simply a reset of the iPhone’s main user interface, called Springboard.
Previous character bugs have been serious by comparison, as they could allow users to crash other people’s iPhones with sent messages, or they caused hard resets. This interface crash requires the user to enter the characters themselves, only takes a second or two, and you don’t even have to restart your iPhone. It’s not a security risk, and you don’t seem to be at risk of losing data. That’s about as low a risk as a crash bug can be.
There have been reports of the Settings app crashing when typed into the Settings app search, but it doesn’t appear to affect Spotlight search. Some say the interface simply refreshes, while others say they’re sent back to the lock screen.
In our testing of the latest iOS 18.1 beta, we found this does not work on searching the app library at all, but it do crashes the Settings app when you type in Settings search and similarly resets Spotlight search. In neither case were we sent back to the lock screen – the interface just flashed and reset.
