iOS 18 has a nasty Messages bug

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…