A newly discovered bug causes iPhones and iPads to temporarily crash, and all it takes is four letters to trigger it.
On Wednesday, a security researcher discovered that typing ” could cause Apple's mobile user interface, known as Springboard, to crash.
TechCrunch confirmed that typing these characters into the search bar in the Settings app also crashes Springboard when you swipe all the way right on the home screen and type them into the search bar in the App Library.
As others have pointed out, all you actually need is “” and some other character. Triggering the bug causes Springboard to crash briefly and then reload to the lock screen. In other tests, the bug caused the screen to flash black for a second.
Apple declined to comment when contacted.
Researchers told TechCrunch that the bug does not appear to be a security issue.
“This is not a security bug,” said Ryan Stoltz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the bug, a sentiment echoed by fellow iOS researcher and founder of security startup DoubleYou, Patrick Wardle.
Unlike a bug in 2020 that caused the Twitter app to crash for users who viewed tweets containing a specific character set, there is no evidence yet to suggest that this bug can be triggered by someone other than the iOS device's owner manually typing characters.