Enter these 4 characters in the wrong place and your iPhone will crash

Want to crash your iPhone? It’s easy. Just enter four simple characters into the App Library search box and the iOS SpringBoard will collapse like a house of cards.

The good news is that Apple appears to already have a fix for this extremely minor bug.

How to crash iPhone SpringBoard with “”:

Surely no one is naive enough to believe that their iPhone is bug-free. Apple is constantly working to eliminate known issues – it is still releasing bug fix updates for its operating systems, which will be released in 2023. But adding features inevitably brings new bugs.

A new version surfaced on Wednesday. A white hat hacker nicknamed Konstantin revealed a very simple method that can be used to crash iOS SpringBoard, Apple’s software that launches the iPhone’s home screen.

To see the strange crash for yourself, open your iPhone Home screenthen scroll all the way to the right to get to your App LibraryTap the Search field at the top of the screen and type:

“”::

That’s four characters: two double quotes followed by two colons. The iOS SpringBoard will immediately reset, with a black screen and a spinning wheel.

No panic

The discovery is more interesting than threatening. A SpringBoard reset simply forces the homescreen software to close and then reopen. It only takes a few seconds and does no harm. Plus, the string that activates the bug isn’t something someone actually needs to search for in the app library.

Even better: Apple has apparently already taken care of the problem. Cult of the Mac I’ve done some testing and the “”:: bug doesn’t affect any iPhone running the latest beta of iOS 18. So when iOS 18 launches in September, you’ll be able to do something you’ve never done before.

If this sounds familiar, in 2017, displaying a very obscure character that wasn’t included in iOS 11’s font caused SpringBoard to reset.