iOS 18 features nasty Messages bug
Apple released iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 on Monday. Although the rollout has been going on for more than three days, unfortunately a pretty serious bug has only now become known. It affects the Messages app and only appears in a very specific situation. It all starts with someone sharing a watch face from their Apple Watch with you in an iMessage thread. If you are using iOS 18 and receive such a shared watch face message, it is extremely important that you do not reply to it.
If you reply specifically to the message in a thread with the shared watch face, Messages will crash repeatedly when you try to open the conversation in question. In fact, the app can crash so extensively that you may also no longer be able to interact with other chats. Once the bug is triggered, it also affects the person who shared the watch face, not just the recipient. The symptoms in this regard are the same as described above.
Until Apple fixes the problem in iOS 18, you can try deleting the entire conversation in question. However, this will most likely fail because the Messages app will crash beforehand. And even if you succeed, it means you would lose the entire conversation with all its history. You will thus forever lose access to attachments like photos and videos that you didn’t save outside of Messages.
If you delete the conversation and then restore it to the recently deleted location, the error will reappear. So that is definitely not a solution either. Apple will likely fix this issue in the first update of iOS 18, which is expected to be called iOS 18.0.1. It should come sooner rather than later.
