A very strange bug found in the iOS 18 Messages app causes it to crash completely if someone shares an Apple Watch watch face.
Share a Watch Face from Your Apple Watch and the iOS 18 Messages App Will Crash Over and Over Again
iOS 18 is barely a week old at this point and a new Messages app bug has already been found. Whenever someone sends you a watch face from Apple Watch, do not reply back to it as a thread. When you do, the Messages app will go into a crash loop, as discovered by 9to5Mac.
That in-line reply cost is so high, if you want to fix it, you have to delete the entire message thread, which means you will lose all your conversation data, no matter how much it is. So basically, deleting the entire chat is the only way to fix this issue, for now at least.
But wait, it gets worse – the Messages app will crash for you and the sender if both are running iOS 18.0. However, here comes the strange part. If you reply to the watch face using iOS 18.1, nothing happens. But if someone replies using iOS 18.0, the Messages app on iOS 18.1 will crash, too.
Who knew sharing a watch face would cause so much damage, especially when the software update is so new, right? Anyway, if someone plays a prank on you by sending you a watch face, you’re going for a wild ride. The only fix is to delete the entire message thread.
Apple is definitely going to issue an update to fix this. So I’m expecting iOS 18.0.1 to arrive within a week. If it doesn’t, I’ll be very surprised, because iOS 18.0 is a buggy mess in certain places. The update seems slightly rushed just to meet a deadline.
I expect iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1 to add that finesse which iOS 18.0 and iPadOS 18.0 definitely lacks. So far, it seems as though both updates are very similar in terms of bugs.
