This iOS 18 Bug Can Only Be Fixed by Deleting Your Messages
iOS 18 adds a lot of new features to the iPhone's Messages app. You can now add text effects to iMessages, schedule messages to send later, and text Android friends with RCS instead of SMS. But despite months of beta testing, iOS 18 also comes with a baked-in Messages bug—one that might force you to delete part of your message history.
Here's what's going on: If you have an Apple Watch, there's a feature that lets you share your current watch face with other users. The watch face shows up as an individual message in a conversation. If you reply to the watch face directly within the thread, either by swiping right on the watch face or long-pressing the message and hitting Reply, Messages will crash for both users in the conversation. Messages will continue to crash whenever you try to open this conversation again. Not only that, Messages may crash when texting other contacts, as well.
A 9to5Mac reader discovered the bug while running iOS 18 and shared their experience with the outlet. 9to5Mac was able to reproduce and confirm the bug on their end too. And while there's a way to stop the crashes from happening, you're not going to like it.
How to fix the iOS 18 "watch face" Messages bug
At this time, the fix for this glitch is simple but not exactly fun: The only way to stop Messages from repeatedly crashing is to delete the conversation where the watch face was replied to. That could mean deleting a thread that's years old, just because someone happened to reply directly to the watch face.
9to5Mac says bringing back the deleted conversation from Recently Deleted won't work either: If you do, you bring the bug—and the crashing—right back. One workaround to bring back these messages might be to erase your iPhone entirely and restore your iPhone from a backup made prior to the watch face reply. If you use Messages in iCloud, however, you might be out of luck: With this feature enabled, your messages are synced over iCloud. That means the entire situation—including the buggy reply—might have already saved to the cloud.
Right now, the best thing you can do is to avoid sharing watch faces entirely. If someone does share a watch face with you, do not directly reply to it, and tell the other person not to reply to it either. Again, this applies only to replying to the watch face message directly; sending an individual message in response (i.e. not within a threaded reply) is fine.
Apple will likely issue a patch in the near future to fix this issue, and, once they do, it'll be safe to reply to these messages. Until then, avoid doing so if you value your Messages history.
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