iOS 18 doesn't like Spotlight searches beginning with letter 'S'

Some iOS 18 users have discovered a rather strange bug that causes Spotlight search to malfunction when they type the letter ‘S’ to search. According to many reports surfacing online, when users open up Spotlight to search for something that starts with the letter ‘S’, Spotlight just resets.

Here’s a video of the bug in question shared by a user on X:

Anyone with an #iPhone16 having issues with Spotlight search when pressing the “S” key? It immediately closes. Happening to me on an #iPhone16Pro and in an #iPhone16ProMax. pic.twitter.com/hcJ6FKRtSy

— Felix Carmona (@felixcarmona46) September 21, 2024

The bug is present in iOS 18 and even in iPadOS 18, as highlighted by some. While it’s not a major problem, it does affect how some users navigate through their phones. One Redditor claims that they managed to work around the bug by simply trying to type the second letter fast. They said, “If i wanna type something starting with an “S” i have to be fast and type a second letter after that.”

Another potential workaround for the time being is to use a special character, as noted by an individual on X. According to them, “if you hold down the ‘s’ key, you can select something like ‘ś’, which works as a regular ‘s’,” Spotlight search won’t glitch out.

General troubleshooting tips like restarting the phone don’t help fix the problem. So it seems the issue is likely embedded in iOS 18 itself. Nevertheless, Apple was likely aware of the bug and has fixed the issue in iOS 18.1 beta. I wasn’t able to replicate it on my iPhone 13 running iOS 18.1 beta 4 and another user also shared a similar experience.

But this isn’t the only bug with Spotlight. There’s a scarier glitch that results in your iPhone crashing when you type in four characters. The four characters in order are “”: along with any other fourth character. Once users type these characters in sequence, their phone glitches and even crashes, but gets resolved soon after. TechCrunch reports that users don’t really need to worry about the issue as it’s not a security risk. This glitch is also not present on iOS 18.1 beta 4, indicating that Apple has likely resolved it already.

So users will likely have to wait until next month for Apple to release the stable iOS 18.1 update with a fix for these weird Spotlight search bugs along with the much-awaited Apple Intelligence features.