Why you should never say hyphen to the iPhone

Bug hits Apple smartphones these days. Just repeating the same word five times is enough to make the Home screen reboot

In the last few hours, a very peculiar iPhone bug is causing discussion. The error occurs when pronouncing the English word Hyphen five times, which in Italian translates as "hyphen". The problem does not affect all smartphones, but only certain models.

In a nutshell, it affects iPhones running iOS 12.1, set to English. But what exactly happens if a person repeats the Hyphen voice command as many as five times? The SpringBoard, aka the app that manages the Home interface, restarts. The glitch turns out to be quite hilarious because it doesn't cause any damage to the iPhone, just a slowdown of a few seconds. And on Italian language phones? It's possible to trigger it, but in different ways. Let's see in detail how to trigger it, what are its characteristics and especially on which iPhone models it is present.

How to restart iPhone by pronouncing Hyphen

There are several ways to test if your iPhone is a victim of the Hyphen bug. The most common one is to access the Today view by swiping from left to right on the Home screen or the Screen Lock screen. Inside it, besides widgets and apps, you'll also find the search bar and the microphone icon, which is precisely the one useful to trigger the bug: just tap the microphone icon and clearly and crisply say the Hyphen voice command five times. At this point the display turns black for a second, and then shows the Home screen.

The rumor is that the small glitch can also be caused in Italian language phones. In this case, you need to start the Notes app and dictate the Italian hyphen word to the system five times.

The Hyphen symbol (displayed as "-") is used when you want to search or write compound words or to create hyphenation of a term, so it is rather unlikely that a person would pronounce it so many times in a row.

Hyphen bug: which iPhone models are affected?

Not all Apple phones have the problem, which occurs only in the iPhone 6, 6s and 6s Max; the iPhone 8, iPhone X and XS Max that have the iOS 12.1 operating system. On the contrary, it does not occur on iPhone SE running iOS 10.3.1. Based on this, the bug is probably attributable to the new iOS update. Apple is aware of it and will most likely fix it with the iOS 12.2 update which is still in beta phase.