You haven’t seen how “good” and “fast” Samsung’s OneUI is. Lots of reddit posts “Instagram works 4x faster on my old iPhone 7 than on my fresh Galaxy S24”. I mean, I thought they solved it since I first noticed it in my old s10+
It's not a common thing people type so takes time for someone to eventually accidentally (or purposely!) type it for it to be discovered.
There is already internal beta that is being tested that fixes this issue, from what I heard from sources.
Who finds these bugs? Such a weird one.
There is a new character bug that can result in a respring on the iPhone or iPad, reports TechCrunch. Typing "":: in the search field after swiping over to the App Library will cause the Springboard to reset, dropping you back at the iPhone's Lock Screen. A respring is not a full reset, and it only takes a few seconds for the iPhone to be functional again.
Typing the same characters into the Settings app search interface will cause the Settings app to crash, but putting it in a Spotlight search doesn't seem to impact anything. The respring seemed to only happen on devices running iOS 17 when we tested, but putting those characters into a search interface on a device running iOS 18 does result in some odd behavior, such as the characters disappearing and the Settings app crashing.
You can actually type in just "": and any other character to cause the respring to happen, so it's something related to the first three symbols in a four character sequence.
Character bugs have in the past spread though Messages and have allowed users to crash the iPhones of others, but this is a much more insignificant issue because the iPhone owner needs to manually type (or paste) the characters into a search interface. There does not appear to be a way to affect an iPhone through Messages or another texting platform.
It's likely Apple will address the issue with an iOS update in the near future.
Article Link: PSA: There's a New Character Bug That Can Cause iPhones to Crash
I think it's kind of odd this was ever discovered at all. Even if that search worked, it's a search throgh App Library and you're never going to find any matches.
Tried it, doesn't happen.
There is a new character bug that can result in a respring on the iPhone or iPad, reports TechCrunch. Typing "":: in the search field after swiping over to the App Library will cause the Springboard to reset, dropping you back at the iPhone's Lock Screen. A respring is not a full reset, and it only takes a few seconds for the iPhone to be functional again.
Typing the same characters into the Settings app search interface will cause the Settings app to crash, but putting it in a Spotlight search doesn't seem to impact anything. The respring seemed to only happen on devices running iOS 17 when we tested, but putting those characters into a search interface on a device running iOS 18 does result in some odd behavior, such as the characters disappearing and the Settings app crashing.
You can actually type in just "": and any other character to cause the respring to happen, so it's something related to the first three symbols in a four character sequence.
Character bugs have in the past spread though Messages and have allowed users to crash the iPhones of others, but this is a much more insignificant issue because the iPhone owner needs to manually type (or paste) the characters into a search interface. There does not appear to be a way to affect an iPhone through Messages or another texting platform.
It's likely Apple will address the issue with an iOS update in the near future.
Article Link: PSA: There's a New Character Bug That Can Cause iPhones to Crash
