Here’s why you shouldn’t type “”:: on your iPhone

Apple’s iOS operating system is known to be pretty stable, but even the mighty iOS cannot escape the occasional bug. Turns out iPhone users have now found one such bug that will crash your iPhone – albeit briefly – and irrespective of which model it is.

What’s even more intriguing is triggering the bug doesn’t take a lot of effort either – all it needs are four characters typed in sequence.

How the code crashes your iPhone

Once you open your iPhone and swipe to the left to reach the right-most screen. You should now reach the App Library, or the screen where all your installed apps can be found.

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Here, entering these four characters – “”:: (two double inverted commas, followed by two colons) will crash your iPhone immediately. The mechanism will not even wait for you to press the return key.

Thankfully, the crash is basic in nature, and only lasts for a couple of seconds during which you will see a black screen with a white loading symbol in the middle. Once it ends, your iPhone will be back on the App Library page.

How the code functions remains a mystery, but it seems pretty harmless for now. However, we wouldn’t recommend you try this on your iPhone until we understand how the crash is triggered and if there are any lasting effects of the same.

Not iPhone’s first crash

There have been many ways to crash iPhones that people have noticed over the years. These include a similar harmless bug that briefly crashed an iPhone when a user typed “:: (one double inverted comma followed by two colons) ahead of any fourth character into Spotlight Search.

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A much more harmful trick to crash iPhones called the “Effective Power” bug was discovered way back in 2015, as per a report by The Hindu, when a particular code could be sent to an iPhone via text message, causing the Messages app to crash and the entire smartphone to reboot soon after.

While there were no lingering effects, the vulnerability would be used by pranksters and attackers to repeatedly send the message and cause a victim’s phone to reboot several times. Thankfully, Apple fixed the bug, and hopefully the company will fix the new one soon enough. Not that many will accidentally search for four rather abstract characters on a daily basis.