Apple has released iOS 18 on Monday, and now that the rollout has been underway for over 48 hours, a rather nasty bug has unfortunately surfaced. It affects the Messages app and can only be triggered by a very specific situation.
It all starts with someone sharing a watch face with you from their Apple Watch in an iMessage thread. If you’re on iOS 18 and receive a shared watch face message like this, it’s imperative that you don’t respond to it.
If you specifically reply to that message in a thread where you share the watch face, Messages will crash repeatedly when you try to open that conversation. The app may even crash so often that you can no longer 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 on that side are the same as described above.
Until Apple fixes this, you can try deleting the entire conversation in question, but that’s likely to fail given how often the Messages app crashes. And even if you succeed, it means you’ll lose the entire conversation and all of its history. That means you’ll forever lose access to any attachments like photos and videos that aren’t stored outside of Messages.
Deleting the conversation and then restoring it from the recently deleted location reintroduces the bug, so that’s definitely not a fix. Apple will likely address this in the first update to iOS 18 (we’re assuming it’s called iOS 18.0. 1), which really can’t come soon enough.