Don’t blame us when you inevitably try it
Phones can be pretty glitchy devices at time, such is their complexity, but we’ve all felt the same frustration when a device crashes or freezes especially at the most important moments.
So, of course, when you hear that there is a way to forcibly make your iPhone crash on demand, you’re going to want to give this little trick a try.
And unsurprisingly, in typical technology-glitching fashion, the way to make this happen concerns typing four extremely very random characters into one of the most niche corners of your phone.
It is safe to say that you’d have to be seriously lost or bored on your phone to accidentally incite this specific glitch.
The glitch in question is very simple in itself, all you have to do is go into settings, locate the search bar at the top and type in -“”::- (Two speech marks and two colons).
Upon doing this, your iPhone screen will likely turn black and exit the app, although it could also cause the phone to freeze and relaunch to a locked home screen.
Both Techcrunch and PCMag gave it a go and confirmed that the glitch is indeed real.
Related links:
The glitch has also been found to happen when typing the characters into the app search bar.
However, people who have given the glitch a go have noted that just typing -“”:- followed by any character will trigger a similar effect.
Some people were worried that this little party trick might have an effect on their phone’s security, however, Ryan Storz, an iOS security researcher, reassured that this is not a possibility.
This is not an isolated incident with other occurrences of typing random symbols into search bars on iPhones with a similar thing happening in 2015 with Arabic characters and the same again in 2018 with Indian Telugu syllable.
Meanwhile in 2020, a combinations of Sindhi characters with the Italian flag caused the iPhones to crash as well.
The real question is, who and how are people finding out this information?
