Apple Watch Faces Are Breaking Messages in iOS 18

The new iOS 18 update that Apple started rolling out this week has a serious bug in the Messages app. The bug will repeatedly crash the app on your phone and the devices of people you’re texting. But there’s a way to avoid it.

The Apple Watch allows you to share custom watch faces over Messages. The recipient can use the shared watch face or reply to it in a thread format just like any other message. When you try to create a threaded response like that for a shared watch face in the new iOS 18, it crashes the app. If you or the person you’re texting tries to open the thread, press “reply,” or even swipe on the watch face, the app will crash every time. The Messages app might even crash if you try to open other conversations once this bug is active.

9to5Mac first reported this issue after one of their readers lost their chat history and shared the discovery. Apple has yet to officially address this bug, but a patch could be coming with the future updates for iOS 18. Right now, the only thing you can do is to clear that thread from the chat history. That might prove tricky with the app repeatedly crashing. You can either delete the threaded responses or you can remove the watch face message, which will also clear the thread linked with it. The person you are texting will have to do the same on their device. Only when both copies of the thread or watch face have been deleted, will the app stop crashing.

If you can’t access the particular conversation because the app keeps crashing when you try, and you don’t want to wait for the patch, the nuclear option is to just clear the entire chat history. Be sure to create a complete backup of your chats and media if you try that though.

The Messages app temporarily keeps deleted chats in a separate folder where they can be restored. According to 9to5Mac, restoring the offending thread will reintroduce the bug. The best thing to do until the patch arrives is to not share watch faces at all.

Source: 9to5Google