Character Flaw: A Postscript

Apple is currently working on a fix for a bug that locked at least one iPhone user out of his device for months. The cause: somewhere between iOS 18 and iOS 26.4, the caron/háček character quietly disappeared from the lock screen keyboard. The user had it in his alphanumeric passcode. He updated. The character was gone. The passcode stopped working. The phone stayed locked. The Register covered it.

Nobody knows exactly when it was removed or why — but the most likely explanation writes itself. The lock screen keyboard isn't a component you'd touch in the normal course of things. The only reason to be in that code right now is Liquid Glass. New rendering pipeline, rebuilt UI components, someone remaps the Czech keyboard layout in the process and the háček falls out. A quiet regression in a visual redesign. Different surface, same root cause as the slider.

And then it just stayed gone. Passed whatever QA exists, whatever review process exists, however many people signed off on however many builds. Survived 26.4. Then 26.4.1. Then .5 beta 1, beta 2, and as of yesterday, beta 3 — with no fix present and no specific release it's been assigned to. At every single one of those gates, nobody caught it. And it's not a narrow problem either — anyone manually typing a password containing a háček without a password manager hit the same wall after updating, locked out of whatever account until a reset. Password manager users were largely fine everywhere except the lock screen, since autofill and clipboard bypass the keyboard entirely. The lock screen is the one place on iOS where you can't paste, can't autofill, can't use a third-party keyboard, and can't use Face ID to sidestep it after a fresh update. Apple removed the only input method for that character in the one context where every other workaround is also unavailable. Then a 21-year-old's Reddit post accomplished what the entire internal process didn't. (If anyone knows the exact point release it disappeared in, ping me on Mastodon.)

Part 2 spent some time on a glassmorphism slider — one developer, an evening, a fix that took Apple six months of point releases to approximate. Same energy. Different surface. The pattern holds.

The student's take when told a fix was coming: impressive they're moving within nine days of the issue being reported. Hard to believe the breaking change was ever signed off on in the first place.

Nine days to fix what survived every internal gate — and nobody can tell you when it broke or why. Or apparently, exactly when it'll be fixed either.

The brand says trust us. The receipts say check the work. The results say do better.