Apple released iOS 18 on Monday, and now that the rollout has been underway for more than 48 hours, a pretty nasty bug has unfortunately surfaced. It’s affecting the Messages app and can only be triggered by a very specific situation.
Namely, it all starts with someone sharing a watch face with you from their Apple Watch in an iMessage thread. If you are on iOS 18 and receive such a shared watch face message, it’s of the utmost importance that you do not reply to it.
If you reply in a thread specifically to that message sharing the watch face, Messages will then repeatedly crash when you try to open the conversation in question. The app may crash so much in fact that it could prevent you from interacting with other chats as well.
Once the bug is triggered, it also affects the person who shared the watch face, not just the receiver. The symptoms are the same on that end as they have been described above.
Until Apple fixes this, you can attempt to delete the entire conversation in question, but you will most likely fail because of how often the Messages app will crash. And even if you succeed, this means you will have lost the entirety of that conversation with all its history. You will thus forever lose access to attachments like photos and videos that haven’t been saved outside of Messages.
If you delete the conversation and then restore it from the recently deleted location the bug will be reintroduced, so that’s definitely not a solution. Apple will probably address this problem in the first update to iOS 18 (we assume named iOS 18.0.1) which really can’t come soon enough.