It seems the iPhone's Achilles' heel might just be the characters on its keyboard.
Over the years, tinkerers have unearthed a number of text bugs that have proven to be the undoing of Apple’s smartphone.
From the "Effective Power" iMessage glitch in 2015 that prompted iPhones to shut down and reboot, to the “ChaiOS” flaw that wreaked havoc with a single click in 2018, the iPhone has seen off its fair share of quirky vulnerabilities.
Fast forward to now, and another curious defect has reared its ugly head. As discovered by cybersecurity researchers, the latest niggle is triggered by typing four characters into specific search fields on an iPhone.
Simply entering “”:: (that’s two double quotation marks followed by two colons) can cause Apple’s mobile interface, better known as Springboard, to crash.
Thankfully, this latest bug isn’t anywhere near as disruptive or damaging as some of its predecessors, making it more of a minor inconvenience than a serious threat. How do we know? Because we tried it, of course.
Typing it into either the search bar in settings or the app library caused our iPhone to momentarily crash and switch back to the home screen.
While it may be tempting to try it out for yourself, we wouldn’t recommend it. Others have reported seeing a black screen after typing the text string, which sounds far more ominous.
The latest bug differs from those that came before in that it requires the user to manually type in the characters. In the past, iPhone crashes were prompted by an incoming message or by opening a link.
Apple has yet to comment on the error, but it typically addresses such bugs relatively quickly by releasing software updates. This time, the company may not be in a rush to fix it, however, as the problem isn’t viewed as a security issue (as confirmed by tech experts to TechCrunch).
The emergence of the bug comes just weeks before the anticipated release of iOS 18, Apple’s biggest ever software update, which will eventually bring with it Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of AI tools and tricks.
