If you enter these four characters, your iPhone home screen will crash

A new software bug is causing iPhone and iPad home screens to crash, but it’s likely only affecting people like you who want to try it out on their own device. Don’t worry, the bug appears to be harmless.

But just in case: We officially advise against causing crashes on your expensive electronic devices.

Typing the characters “::” in three specific places on your iPhone will crash Springboard, the app that controls the home screen, which in turn will crash your home screen:

• The search function on the home screen
• The search bar in the app library
• The search bar in the Settings app

A security researcher on Mastodon posted a tweet on X pointing out the bug. Technically, the first three characters cause the bug – any character typed after that will trigger it.

This is terrible news if you’re a developer working on a new app called Quote Quote Colon Colon, but most people won’t encounter it. The bug also doesn’t appear consistently on the current iOS 18 betas – I tested it on iOS 18.0 developer beta 7 and iOS 18.1 developer beta 2 on an iPhone 15 Pro and an iPhone 15 Pro Max, respectively.

On an iPad Pro (3rd generation) running iPadOS 17.6.1, the current release version, the bug did not occur in the home screen search bar, but it did cause Springboard to crash when searching in the app library and when searching in the Settings app, and the device was thrown back to the lock screen.

This isn’t the first time random characters have tripped up iPhones. “Text bombs” previously plagued iPhone users in 2020, 2018, 2017, and 2015. Fortunately, the new bomb appears to be just a bug and not an attack vector like some of the old ones that could crash your phone if someone sent the text in a message.