Apple has a strange crashing bug on its hands that is affecting iPhone owners When you type certain strings into your device's search bar, your phone behaves unexpectedly; Springboard, the iPhone's interface, crashes for a short while after that string is used, before reverting and working again

The bug, posted by Konstantin on the social media site Mastodon, can be activated by typing two pairs of quotation marks and two colons ("::)

It can also be crashed by typing any other string, as long as there are quotation marks in the first slot of the text string and a colon in the third slot For example, typing A":B will crash the UI

In total, you (or anyone else who gets your phone) can enter a string in three places that will cause a crash; the app library search, settings search, and Spotlight search screens all work, as long as the OS-level search bar

Fortunately, the problem seems to resolve quickly and the phone returns to normal within seconds More importantly, security researcher Ryan Shortz told TechCrunch that the crash does not open up any further vulnerabilities that would allow a malicious person to enter your phone

The crash affects different versions of iOS differently: on iOS 17, text causes Springboard to crash and soft reboot after a while on iOS 18 and iOS 181 beta, typing text causes Spotlight Search freezes and does not crash completely

Whether iOS 17 or iOS 18, you should avoid typing this string into your phone's search bar, just in case Most people report that a software restart will do the trick, but we cannot guarantee that tinkering with such a bug will not cause more serious problems with your device

Apple has not yet commented on the crashing issue, but we will update this article if the company says anything