iOS 18 bug can cause Messages app to crash - here's how to avoid data loss

Apple finally launched iOS 18 on Monday, and like clockwork, the bugs are starting to come out of the woodwork. 

It all starts with the Apple Watch. You can directly share a watch face with someone else through Messages or Mail. The idea is to give other people access to a personalized face that you tweaked yourself.

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Next, let's say the recipient uses Messages in iOS 18 to reply to any text in a conversation thread that contains the shared watch face. With iOS 14 and higher, you can respond inline to any previous message in a thread simply by pressing down on it and tapping Reply. 

But if you're running iOS 18, don't do that.

Apparently, if your phone has iOS 18, replying inline to a message with the shared watch face causes the Messages app to crash. Not only that, but you could end up losing all the messages in the conversation. The bug was encountered by someone who shared the discovery with 9to5Mac, which was then able to reproduce the issue.

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But the problem doesn't end there. If you bump into this glitch, Messages will repeatedly crash if you try to open the conversation in the app. This means sending or responding to messages in other conversations may not be possible either. What's more, once the bug has popped up, both the sender and recipient of the shared watch face message fall into the same trap.

On the positive side, replying to the message will not trigger the glitch if you're running iOS 18.1, currently available as a developer beta -- as long as you don't use the reply in-thread function. Doing so in a conversation that contains the shared watch face will cause Messages to crash on iOS 18.1 beta, iPadOS 18.1 beta, and MacOS 15.1 beta, 9to5Mac explained.

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With the app repeatedly crashing, taking any action to resolve the issue is challenging. The only workaround for now is to delete the entire conversation if you can. But this will remove all content in the thread, including messages and attached photos and videos. Even restoring the deleted conversation won't help since that would reintroduce the bug. 

For now, those of you with iOS 18 and an Apple Watch should refrain from sharing any watch faces through the Messages app. If you see a shared face in a conversation, don't respond to it or to any other message in the thread. With this and other glitches hitting the latest versions of Apple's operating systems, your best bet is to wait for a bug fixing update to arrive, which hopefully will be sometime in the near future.