Paul Morris·

How To Crash iOS 11.3.x SpringBoard On Any iPhone

Most users get irate and understandably upset when a platform crashes and refuses to let any progression or usage take place. However, in this instance, it seems that someone has purposely tried to crash Apple’s iOS platform, and seems to have succeeded in doing so with a specific set of steps.

Apple’s internal QA team goes through rigorous processes in order to try and ensure that builds of the platform don’t go out to the public with major crashes and issues. However, we all know that in a product as large as iOS that it simply isn’t going to happen and that issues will always be found.

In this instance, rather finding a niggling small bug or issue, one reader of ours has discovered a method of steps which recreates a crash of the iPhone SpringBoard with alarming regularity. You know, just in case you want to infuriate yourself by locking your ability to use the device.

In all honesty, the process itself is not exactly one that the average user is going to inadvertently find themselves replicating on a daily basis, so, although the crash exists, it’s not exactly one that’s going to be stumbled across on the regular.

It basically involves invoking the widget editing section of the device at the same time as swiping it up to get access to the Home screen to essentially repeat the process. Once there are multiple instances of this screen and view open, then it’s possible to take a few additional steps to actually make the iOS 11 SpringBoard crash and become unresponsive.

This isn’t a discovered bug which ultimately crashes iOS as a whole but it does make the iOS 11.3 / 11.3.1 SpringBoard unresponsive, which is sometimes how a lot of researchers actually manage to get a foot in the door when it comes to finding and exploiting bugs in the platform. The issue though doesn’t appear to exist in the iOS 11.4 betas, which means that Apple has fixed the issue, either advertently or inadvertently.

Additionally, we already know that iOS 12 will be focusing on improving performance and stability of Apple’s mobile OS rather than getting jammed with new features and functions as is generally the expectation. This is likely due to the fact that Apple’s software quality has gone down over the last few years and now company wants to make the quality a top priority so that bugs such as this one doesn’t appear in the system this frequently.

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