iOS 18 is out now, and it’s an update that brings a lot of good things, but it also comes with at least one quite serious bug. Fortunately, it’s a bug that’s also easy to avoid if you know about it.
9to5Mac reports that if someone shares their Apple Watch face with you in the Messages app, then – if you’re running iOS 18 and reply to the message in a thread – the Messages app will crash for both you and the person who sent the Apple Watch face.
This isn’t just a one-off crash though – it will also then crash any time you try to open that conversation, and will frequently crash when you’re viewing other conversations too, leaving the entire Messages app near unusable.
Deletion is the only solution
The only fix that has been found is to delete the conversation that triggered the bug from both devices, a process which can be tricky, since the Messages app will keep crashing. And of course, doing this means you lose that whole conversation, including any photos or videos that haven’t been saved outside of Messages.
You can restore the conversation from the Recently Deleted folder, but this will reportedly reintroduce the bug.
9to5Mac additionally reports that the bug won’t be triggered if you reply to the Apple Watch face using a device running the iOS 18.1 beta, only iOS 18. But it seems that if someone replies from a device running iOS 18 then the bug can be triggered for the sender of the Apple Watch face, even if their device is running different software.
It’s not clear if this bug will always trigger under the above circumstances, but it’s definitely not worth the risk. So for now, do not share Apple Watch faces in the Messages app, regardless of what version of iOS your device is running, and if someone shares an Apple Watch face with you, don’t respond to it in a thread if you’re running iOS 18.
Presumably Apple will already be working to fix this issue, perhaps in an iOS 18.0.1 update, so hopefully you’ll be safe to share Apple Watch faces again soon. And once it’s been resolved, anyone who’s already fallen victim to this bug should hopefully be able to safely restore the conversation from their Recently Deleted folder.