Bored? Swipe all the way over to the App Library on your iPhone and type “”:: in the search bar. Congratulations! You’ve just crashed your iPhone. But don’t worry — it’s not permanent or serious, according to security researchers.
Mastodon user Konstantin found that typing those four characters into the search bar will crash SpringBoard, the app responsible for the iPhone home screen. All it does is throw the phone into a loop for a moment before returning you to your lock screen. It doesn’t close any apps or cause any other issues; if anything, it’s just a reset. I tested it on my device and found nothing out of the ordinary.
This was on an iPhone running iOS 17.5.1, but others here at Digital Trends have found it doesn’t work on their devices running the iOS 18 beta. It also only seems to work when typed into the App Library; swiping down and searching doesn’t yield the same result. However, attempting the same bug in the search bar of the Settings app does trigger it. Weird stuff!
Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher, told TechCrunch: “It’s not a security bug.” You don’t need to worry about this granting access to malicious third parties, and there’s also no reason to believe this can be triggered by anyone other than yourself (or someone using your phone) typing those characters in. Most likely, it’s an internal bug no one accounted for and will be fixed with a future iOS update.
Other users discovered that the bug can be triggered by simply typing in “”: and any other character. The results are the same, no matter what method you use. There’s no benefit or harm to doing so, but it’s an interesting discovery in an operating system that has been around for the better part of two decades.
TechCrunch reached out to Apple for a statement, but so far, there’s been no response. This isn’t the first time a bug like this has appeared, either. In 2015, an iMessage bug could crash and fully shut down iPhones from a single text.
This current glitch isn’t likely to cause problems, especially since those characters wouldn’t be typed into a search bar under normal conditions anyway (although I can see someone creating an app named “”:: just for kicks).
