In a surprising turn of events, a curious text string has been found to cause iPhones to crash, bringing to light a peculiar bug in Apple’s iOS. This latest glitch was uncovered by a security researcher on Mastodon, who demonstrated that entering a specific sequence of characters into Spotlight Search or the App Library on an iPhone would lead to an immediate crash. The problematic text string is as simple as this: “”: followed by any other character.
As detailed by a recent report from TechCrunch, it only takes typing the combination of “”: with any fourth character to trigger the crash. However, experts have assured users that this issue does not pose any security threat. They emphasize that there is no indication that anyone other than the iPhone owner manually entering these characters could exploit the bug.
Adding further insight, 9to5Mac conducted tests across various iPhone models and iOS versions. Their findings show that on the latest iOS 17, entering the offending characters causes the iPhone’s Home Screen interface, known as Springboard, to crash and then quickly reboot. For those using iOS 18 or iOS 18.1, the bug results in a brief freeze of Spotlight Search, but it stops short of crashing the entire interface.
This issue is limited to scenarios where the text string is typed into Spotlight Search or the App Library search bar directly from the Home Screen. While disruptive, the bug is not unprecedented in Apple’s history.
So far, Apple has not released an official statement regarding this newly discovered bug. However, the company is typically swift in addressing such flaws through software updates. Given the rare nature of someone intentionally typing the “”:: string, this glitch is likely to be more of an oddity than a major concern for most users. As always, users can expect a fix to roll out in an upcoming iOS update.
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Published: 22 Aug 2024, 10:56 PM IST
