Image: Ed Hardy/D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
Want to make your iPhone crash? It’s easy. Type four simple characters into the App Library’s search field and the iOS SpringBoard will go down like a house of cards.
The good news is that a fix already seems to be on the way from Apple for this extremely minor bug.
How to make iPhone SpringBoard crash with “”::
Surely no one is naive enough to believe their iPhone is bug-free. Apple works constantly to get rid of known problems — it’s still introducing bug fix updates for its operating systems released in 2023. But adding features inevitably brings new bugs.
A fresh one showed up Wednesday. A white-hat hacker who goes by Konstantin called attention to a very simple way to crash the iOS SpringBoard, Apple’s software that launches the iPhone Home Screen.
To see the weird crash for yourself, open your iPhone’s Home Screen, then flip all the way to the right to get to your App Library. Tap in the search box at the top of the screen and enter:
“”::
That’s four characters: two double quotes followed by two colons. The iOS SpringBoard resets immediately, with a black screen and a spinning wheel.
Don’t panic
The discovery is more interesting than threatening. A SpringBoard reset simply forces the Home Screen software to close then reopen. This takes only a few seconds and does no damage. Besides, the string of symbols that activate the bug is not anything anyone is actually going to need to search the App Library for.
Even better, Apple apparently already took care of the problem. Cult of Mac ran a few tests, and the “”:: bug doesn’t affect an iPhone running the latest iOS 18 beta. So when iOS 18 launches in September, you can go back to doing something you’ve never done before.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, way back in 2017, viewing a very obscure character not in the iOS 11 font caused SpringBoard to reset.