Thursday, August 22, 2024

iOS 17 Search String Crash

Juli Clover (Slashdot):

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.

[…]

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.

This one doesn’t even require Unicode.

Buttered Jorts:

“”:X where X is any additional character will trigger it.

Previously:

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This being labelled as a "character bug" is off to me since it's billed as in the same vein as combining characters causing odd, overflowing or out-of-range behavior in layout or font shaping code. This looks and feels like a tokenizer/parser bug, with the common denominators being "triggered by text entry of some kind" and "terribly drastic outcome".


Interestingly, on iOS 18, the search now happens in a new Spotlight process, instead of in Springboard, so it no longer crashes the whole UI, it just crashes the Spotlight process. Progress :-)


Happens in iOS 16 as well.

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