Safari on iPhone crashing after typing
The issue here is that when you start typing certain letters into the address bar in Safari, the Safari app will immediately crash. This means you can’t complete your search or complete the process of typing in the URL of the website you’re attempting to visit. It seems to affect all versions of iOS 16. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to affect iPhone users in certain countries.
The bug was first pointed out by users on Twitter, and we’ve been able to verify it in our own testing. For example, if I open safari on my iPhone 14 Pro Max and start typing “Wells Fargo” into the address bar, Safari immediately crashes after I type the first three letters, “wel,” into the address bar.
There are a number of different words and searches that seem to cause this problem, as noted by MacRumors: “tar,” “bes,” “wal,” “wel,” “old,” “sta,” “pla.” There are surely other combinations that trigger this crash, and it’s something that’s impossible to test for.
This is likely due to some sort of text rendering bug affecting the suggested results that appear in Safari when you start typing. The first reports of the problem started surfacing overnight into Monday morning, indicating that it’s a server-side bug of some sort. This means Apple should be able to fix it without releasing a dedicated software update.