In an era of expensive devices or services falling prey to security problems and whatnot, it’s always nice to hear about a genuinely funny and seemingly harmless iPhone bug.
Spotted by a security researcher named Konstantin on Mastodon (and corroborated by TechCrunch), typing the characters “”:: (that is, two quotation marks followed by two colons) into some iPhone text entry fields can cause the phone to temporarily crash. TechCrunch confirmed that it works if you do it while searching in the Settings app or searching through your app library; I won’t be testing this myself and wouldn’t recommend anyone else try it either.
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To be fair, however, it doesn’t appear that this is a security issue — and it doesn’t seem like it should cause long-term issues for any phones that do suffer this specific kind of crash. It’s also easy enough to avoid, as that particular string of characters is more akin to something a toddler (or very groggy adult who just woke up) would type into their phone.
We reached out to Apple and will update this piece if we get a response.
