after Apple removed a character from its Czech keyboard
I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?
In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"
Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone security for law enforcement and the like, but I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do it (at any price) unless you could somehow trick them into thinking you had some "interesting" data on there...
It’s wild that "verify existing passcodes remain inputtable" isn't the absolute first item on the QA checklist for any keyboard layout change. The Czech layout isn't exactly an obscure edge case.
The USB keyboard suggestion mentioned in the other comments likely won't work either because of USB Restricted Mode. After an hour of being locked, iOS disables data over the Lightning/USB-C port until the device is unlocked. It’s a perfect, recursive failure: you can't unlock the phone because the character is missing, and you can't plug in a hardware keyboard because the phone is locked.
Treating the passcode keyboard as a transient UI element that can be "cleaned up" rather than a hard security dependency is a massive architectural oversight. If the OS allows a character to be used in a passcode, that glyph needs to be permanently accessible in a fallback mode, no matter what the localization team decides to prune.
If I'd get a dollar for every annoying bug that Apple misses due to being hopelessly Bay Area brained, I'd probably get at least a free official Apple cleaning cloth every couple of years.
I agree with you and don't really get what Apple gets from removing a valid Czech character, but how would you test if all existing passcodes remain inputable without knowing the passcodes of all iPhone users?
The one way to do this that I could see is to include both the new keyboard and the old one and if someone fails to unlock with the new one auto report that to Apple (not the code, just that the unlock failed and that the keyboard might be the problem), then auto revert to the old keyboard on the next unlock attempt...
You can guarantee it by not removing characters from the keyboard used for password entry. If the set of characters available before the change is a subset of or equal to the set after the change, then all existing passwords must still be enterable.
If allowing that character in the first place was a mistake, then Apple has pushed the consequences of their mistake onto the users instead of owning the mistake and keeping that character available forever on existing devices.
Phased roll-out. You first introduce a version that still accepts all extant inputs but will actively warn that there are characters that will be removed in a future release.
Then you wait. Then you roll out a version where the new functionality is flipped on by default, but where you still allow to explicitly toggle to the old one. Then you wait some more.
And then - only then - you roll out a release where the old functionality has been removed entirely.
And perhaps also introduce an upgrade blocker, as the keyboard app notifies the system of a situation that would be unsafe to upgrade to newer releases
Meh, I think you keep the old keyboard and set a password expiry. New passwords use the new keyboard. Or, if you're in a rush to remove the old code, _after_ next login you require password replacement and use the new onscreen keyboard from then.
You can but you have to tie it to actual devices and a point in time, not simply a specific OS version. Essentially, all devices that existed before the change must still support the old set of characters and devices produced (or sold or activated) afterwards can support the reduced set.
Or wait until a future OS version that will not support any device currently in existence.
Probably the better solution is to include some kind of special lock-screen keyboard that provides some fallback mechanism to input any character. Presumably there are similar edge cases where someone creates a password using one keyboard, then switches keyboard layout, and now can't re-enter it using the active layout...
Indeed. For example, most desktop operating systems have a keybinding for «search for any Unicode symbol by name and input it». That would make sense to have as a fallback button on a virtual keyboard too.
The iOS emoji selector is close in UI/UX already, but the search is restricted to the emoji range of Unicode.
Yes, it really is that simple. They chose that responsibility the moment they allowed those characters. Any deductions done after that need to have a failsafe with the expectation they will break a clueless user's device.
A very simple alternative also would have to have provided a way to do a rollback to previous version until first complete boot after update at least. Would probably also cover for other kinds of problems.
> During in-house testing, which involved taking an iPhone 16 from iOS 18.5 to iOS 26.4.1, The Register found that Apple has kept the háček in the Czech keyboard, but removed the ability to use it in a custom alphanumeric passcode. The OS will not allow users to input the háček as a character. The key's animation triggers, as does the keyboard's key-tap sound, but the character is not entered into the string.
Sounds more like an actual bug than a decision to change the keyboard layout, if this happens only in the passcode screen?
Since the beginning, iPhone keyboard is wrong in entering a character first, háček second. It has been the other way around on typewriters and then computers for decades. Then some smart guy at apple thought he knows better. One of those never-fixed-bugs.
Wait, really? I thought "dead keys" being diacritics prefixes, not suffixes, was pretty universal. At least that's how it works with ^, ´, and ` on macOS for me.
I think the biggest lesson here is to back up. The reason for losing access to the phone is amazingly dumb but it could have fallen down the stairs for basically the same effect.
And do your could backups cross-provider. You never know what the "big players" are going to pull, and your lifetime customer value is less than the cost of a single support call.
This is exactly the reason why I keep all my shit on an SD card despite Google deliberately making the external storage experience as painful as possible: slow access, broken writes, failed unmounts, no filesystem repair. Literally every time I restart my phone I need to put the card to my PC and repair the filesystem. Also, same card works extremely well when plugged into PC via random cheap USB card reader.
On PCs you still have Linux that resists enshittification and you can pick your own hardware, but it's a really sad state of affairs that there is literally no meaningful mobile system that isn't actively hostile to the user.
This really should be escalated to the point where Apple engineers build a one-off / custom iOS so that this person can unlock their phone and change their passcode. I'm sure this is in the realm of possibilities. It is such a bad look.
I used to have an emoji password for my Android phone, and had the exact same issue after a reset! It's an odd but pretty terrible failure mode for locking oneself out...
You say locking oneself out, but I decline to consider any situation where a password can be set but not later entered as one where the user bears even a modicum of fault.
As a non-English speaker I can really relate to this. I think the real mistake was Apple allowing to enter a non-ASCII password in the first place. E.g. on macOS the password fields have been locked to English character set, and I'm not sure why it changed on iOS.
Regardless, why should a Vietnamese person be forced to restrict their password to ASCII? If you want to sell your devices in a country, the least you can do is to adopt to the local market. I get that Western cultural dominance makes this hard for some, but I think it should be the bare minimum.
I would also argue the counterpoint : why are the local markets adopting things that are barely functional to them?
As a comparison, if all Vietnamese people had three feet and three arms, would they all be walking around with two left and a single right Nike shoe while wearing a Champion shirt with an extra arm thrust through the sleeve?
At what point do customers and users realize they are responsible for giving consent?
You can use emojis as passwords, do you think that's a good idea? They work now, there's a good chance that they won't be the same forever. See what happened to the family emojis
I think there's a distinction to be made between 'is it a good idea for someone informed enough to know how these things go in the real world?' i.e. the HN audience and 'should this be a real worry in a sane world?' to which I say no, it shouldn't be a worry that if I was allowed to enter a password today I may not be able to tomorrow.
That's just excuses for moronic decisions of trillion dollar companies.
In my password, I have the Collectivity of Saint Martin flag emoji and United States Minor Outlying Islands flag emoji next to the French flag emoji and US flag emoji. For good measure, also the flag of Chad next to the flag of Romania. I am sure it's not going to cause any issues.
Passwords are more secure if they are higher entropy, so it makes sense to support a larger variety of characters, Czech or emoji.
It seems paramount that the OS should not allow password input of any characters which it theater takes away. At the very minimum if this is absolutely necessary to make this breaking change, the user should be warned several times that a character in the password is no longer valid and maybe even prevent the OS from upgrading before the password is changed to a forward-compatible one.
Well, alphabets change (especially emojis), rules change, etc, so keeping a single subset of stable and known characters is unlikely to be a bad idea :)
If you remember what was the encodings situation before UTF-8 became the norm... Let's say it was really ugly. E.g. there were at least two popular encodings for Russian Cyrillic letters — CP1251 and KOI8-R, and it was _very_ common for applications getting it wrong. Restricting things like passwords (and ideally even file names) to ASCII this was a practical necessity rather than an inconvenience.
Unicode was introduced to solve that very problem, and it largely does.
In the olden times, even ASCII wasn’t necessarily a safe bet, as many countries used their own slight variation of ASCII. For example, Japan had the Yen sign in place of the backslash. In a fictional ASCII world, Apple could have decided to remove the Yen key from the Japanese lockscreen keyboard.
Well yes, but you can process all passwords as UTF-8, as most of strings are in mac/iOS anyways, to avoid these problems. Then just don’t break an established standard like the keyboard layout. Is that too much to ask for in 2026?
Majority of California based companies employee English only or English and Spanish speakers possibly with some Indian language as well. This leads to lots of problems when you are bilingual or bilingual in other languages such as German in French. Neither Apple nor Microsoft under this sort of language swapping well. Never mind rarer languages like Czech or Greek.
> Majority of California based companies employee English only or English and Spanish speakers possibly with some Indian language as well [...] Never mind rarer languages like Czech or Greek.
That may be generally true, in this case Apple actually has an engineering team in Czechia that works on biometrics and authentication:
I'm a little impressed with Google. Recently the assistant started understanding when I speak Portuguese or when my wife switches to it in a text message. I hadn't had that experience before, the assistants would pick one language and mispronounce the other.
Alexa has an experimental bilingual mode but it's nerfed by its general failure to understand well.
Netflix can't even auto-translate subtitles (in the age of genai where we are close to generating entire movies from scratch). Let alone ever imagine that you'd want to see subtitles in two languages at once.
The side of my brain that manages organizational changes wonders: how does Apple, a 50 year old company of tens of thousands of engineers and over a trillion USD market cap, manage to keep feature velocity high while not making more of these types of errors?
The bug seems low likelihood but high severity for the few affected users. Other than simply never changing the login keyboard (or any of the keyboard code) or having nearly 100% test coverage, how does a company not accidentally have more of these types of issues?
> how does Apple, a 50 year old company of tens of thousands of engineers and over a trillion USD market cap, manage to keep feature velocity high while not making more of these types of errors?
They don't. If you're anything other than an extremely casual user of iOS or macOS for a couple of years, you'll encounter things that really make you pull your hair out by shear magnitude of "how on Earth can anyone miss this!?".
They do. It’s just that the people using these devices won’t go public with it. I’ve seen so many bizarre bugs in my own experience but I’ve gotten zero articles on them by popular tech journals.
They do. Companies mess things up all the time. But only a fraction of bugs get discovered and then reported, so it appears that their quality is ok.
I have recently discovered several bugs in different products created by different companies. And none has been reported so far in my research despite the products' popularity. I am not surprised, since those bugs require specific combination of conditions to be triggered, which most people have never run into, like in this article.
And I don't even blame them -- the engineers probably could never think of such use cases and don't have those workflows themselves. You'd have to really go out of your way to use obscure workflows to discover them.
Although in this case Apple dropped the ball by locking user out and not providing any alternatives.
Even if he did have a Mac with the continuity feature enabled, I suppose the lock-screen won’t accept a paste from the clipboard of a Mac.
(If it did, he could enter the correct passcode in any text editor on his Mac, copy it to the clipboard on the Mac, then paste it into the lock-screen on his iPhone)
I assume you can use a physical keyboard on an iPhone like I can on Android via USB? Presumably you could buy a wired Czech keyboard to access the device?
Twice I have had the touchscreen fail on Android devices and been able to get what I needed off them using a USB mouse.
For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
This really reads like a modern Ancient-Greek story about inscrutable gods who suddenly decide to complicate your life for some unclear reason and don't respond to any prayers and rituals.
People are afraid of AI, but human organizations can be quite opaque as well.
That said, as a Czech, I wouldn't use any accentuated characters in my passwords. Anything beyond 7-bit ASCII is just asking for trouble.
Seems like a front-end bug? So just access the API directly, or ask someone who knows how to do that? Plenty of iOS-focused reverse engineers out there.
> For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
The user can't even enter their passcode, how do you expect them to perform code execution?
there was a time when I used a simple "§" in my password. turned out, some Android keyboards don't have the "§". Since then I play it safe with my passwords, using only characters I don't need a specialized keyboard for
It’s an annoying workaround, but could he connect a USB keyboard (via a USB to lightning adapter) with the ability to enter the character? Does the passcode screen accept input from attached keyboards?
> For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
I feel bad for the guy and all the Apple users constantly sharing stories of being mistreated and abused. Stop giving these companies your money and consent.
I'm basically numb to it at this point though. Every few days we read on this site small permutations of the same story. Sometimes people here get a little extra backchannel support, but that's a token prize for the jester who made a king chuckle.
Then a few more days go by and everyone upvotes a new iWidget to oblivion because it has 0.1 new gigablahs or takes up a milliblah less of some bullshit nobody was asking for.
All while we collectively virtue signal that people are spending too much time and relying on technology too much.
Well, it's almost Monday let's see what new bullshit convinces everyone to keep getting fucked and pay for the privilege.
> I feel bad for the guy and all the Apple users constantly sharing stories of being mistreated and abused. Stop giving these companies your money and consent.
Here's a challenge: walk into a store and attempt to buy a smartphone that is not iPhone or Android.
This is the situation that consumers face. Some alternatives exist, but most consumers are completely unaware of them, because the alternatives have no advertising budget or retail presence.
I think it's quite similar to the political duopoly. Third parties exist, but they have no advertising budget, and moreover, in a Catch-22 situation, they get little or no news coverage, precisely because they have no advertising budget, and thus the news media considers them "not viable." That's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Actually the same situation exists in tech: Apple and Google get huge amounts of free news coverage in addition to their paid advertising. The media appears to feel no obligation to help people escape from duopolies; guess who pays for their advertising...
Yes, the phone market is bad. But, you know you don't have to do everything in a phone, right?
Want to take pictures? Use a camera. If it somehow auto updates your photos are still on an SD card.
I get convenience has led everyone to expect their phone to do everything for them, but it's not working. When you're in a pinch you will go to a 7-Eleven and grab food, but everyone would agree that buying everything there instead of real groceries is a terrible strategy. Just because something is convenient doesn't mean it's good.
> I get convenience has led everyone to expect their phone to do everything for them, but it's not working.
It's mostly working, though. For every story of someone experencing a severe problem, there are millions of non-stories of people not experiencing the problem.
Inconveniencing yourself every day just to avoid the rare situation is not necessarily a great life strategy. Furthermore, most consumers are not as aware of these problem cases as we are. They don't expect the worst until it's too late.
Admittedly, failing to back up is just dumb, and everyone should know that by now. On the other hand, nobody should be expecting that a software update will kill their passcode.
Well I only use alphanumeric US keyboard standards ever since I found out, that certain characters unique to a language different from yours causes you lock out or massive headaches on a used keyboard with almost no print ink left on the keyboard in a Internet cafe in an other country around 2002.
Be aware of characters not passwords. I feel bad for the guy but not really blame Apple here.
English is my second language and ANSI etc is following a basic character usage. Everything must boil down to 0 and 1 in the end or American English.
It is a de facto standard and maybe knowing about it is as crucial as recognizing the difference between the imperial and metric system before heading for the moon. It is a life saver.
I agree with the recommendation, but it's absurd to not blame Apple here. There is absolutely nothing acceptable about what Apple did in this case, it's a major fuck-up to break password input in this way, and for no reason whatsoever.
I wonder what the thought process (or perhaps lack thereof) at Apple was. Did no one of the likely-somewhat-large team who did that think "wait, this could lock out our users who may have used that character"?
In the immortal words of Linus Torvalds: "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!"
Now one of the ways in might be those companies who claim to be able to break iPhone security for law enforcement and the like, but I'm not sure if they'd be willing to do it (at any price) unless you could somehow trick them into thinking you had some "interesting" data on there...
The USB keyboard suggestion mentioned in the other comments likely won't work either because of USB Restricted Mode. After an hour of being locked, iOS disables data over the Lightning/USB-C port until the device is unlocked. It’s a perfect, recursive failure: you can't unlock the phone because the character is missing, and you can't plug in a hardware keyboard because the phone is locked.
Treating the passcode keyboard as a transient UI element that can be "cleaned up" rather than a hard security dependency is a massive architectural oversight. If the OS allows a character to be used in a passcode, that glyph needs to be permanently accessible in a fallback mode, no matter what the localization team decides to prune.
The one way to do this that I could see is to include both the new keyboard and the old one and if someone fails to unlock with the new one auto report that to Apple (not the code, just that the unlock failed and that the keyboard might be the problem), then auto revert to the old keyboard on the next unlock attempt...
If allowing that character in the first place was a mistake, then Apple has pushed the consequences of their mistake onto the users instead of owning the mistake and keeping that character available forever on existing devices.
Then you wait. Then you roll out a version where the new functionality is flipped on by default, but where you still allow to explicitly toggle to the old one. Then you wait some more.
And then - only then - you roll out a release where the old functionality has been removed entirely.
There should be migration taken into consideration that is kept to any previous version allowed to be upgraded from.
You basically can't ever remove an available character.
That includes emojis if they're allowed in IOS passwords.
Or wait until a future OS version that will not support any device currently in existence.
The iOS emoji selector is close in UI/UX already, but the search is restricted to the emoji range of Unicode.
Sure they have most of their stuff translated but some rough edges make me feel they do the bare minimum:
- Their ISO keyboard sucks. Sure their overall quality makes it good but of the major brands their Enter key is the most flimsy attempt at it
- Some long standing bugs https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250299816?sortBy=rank (which I had the impressions they were made worse in localized version or at least if you used a non American date format)
- General weirdness with translation missing sometimes
And from what I've seen, Apple's always supported fewer languages and input methods than Google/Microsoft, like they simply cant be bothered.
I don't think we can assume the team is large.
Sounds more like an actual bug than a decision to change the keyboard layout, if this happens only in the passcode screen?
And do your could backups cross-provider. You never know what the "big players" are going to pull, and your lifetime customer value is less than the cost of a single support call.
Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave if he could see the software quality of the products that Apple releases today.
Or release some sort of open version once device is EOL'd.
On PCs you still have Linux that resists enshittification and you can pick your own hardware, but it's a really sad state of affairs that there is literally no meaningful mobile system that isn't actively hostile to the user.
People need to wake up to the fact that Android has become iOS but worse.
Even if Apple restores the háček in a future update, wouldn't he still need to unlock the iPhone to install it?
As a comparison, if all Vietnamese people had three feet and three arms, would they all be walking around with two left and a single right Nike shoe while wearing a Champion shirt with an extra arm thrust through the sleeve?
At what point do customers and users realize they are responsible for giving consent?
That's just excuses for moronic decisions of trillion dollar companies.
It seems paramount that the OS should not allow password input of any characters which it theater takes away. At the very minimum if this is absolutely necessary to make this breaking change, the user should be warned several times that a character in the password is no longer valid and maybe even prevent the OS from upgrading before the password is changed to a forward-compatible one.
But there is already a known pattern on how to handle this which I was taught (before the original iPhone even) in university CS studies:
If the manner of entering credentials has to change,
Then on first entry, offer the old method,
And, because you now (temporarily) have the plaintext credentials, you can now inspect it and test if anything need to change for the future,
And then set a flag, or require user action , or just re-encode, to use the new method as inspection determines.
In the olden times, even ASCII wasn’t necessarily a safe bet, as many countries used their own slight variation of ASCII. For example, Japan had the Yen sign in place of the backslash. In a fictional ASCII world, Apple could have decided to remove the Yen key from the Japanese lockscreen keyboard.
That may be generally true, in this case Apple actually has an engineering team in Czechia that works on biometrics and authentication:
https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/ekonomika/apple-posili-v-praze-ty...
https://jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200636301-2611/software...
Alexa has an experimental bilingual mode but it's nerfed by its general failure to understand well.
Only thing I can think of is some features being available later in danish compared to the English release like the swipe keyboard in iOS.
Language support is still such an enigma.
The bug seems low likelihood but high severity for the few affected users. Other than simply never changing the login keyboard (or any of the keyboard code) or having nearly 100% test coverage, how does a company not accidentally have more of these types of issues?
They don't. If you're anything other than an extremely casual user of iOS or macOS for a couple of years, you'll encounter things that really make you pull your hair out by shear magnitude of "how on Earth can anyone miss this!?".
The same goes for feature velocity.
This bug got popularity that’s all.
I have recently discovered several bugs in different products created by different companies. And none has been reported so far in my research despite the products' popularity. I am not surprised, since those bugs require specific combination of conditions to be triggered, which most people have never run into, like in this article.
And I don't even blame them -- the engineers probably could never think of such use cases and don't have those workflows themselves. You'd have to really go out of your way to use obscure workflows to discover them.
Although in this case Apple dropped the ball by locking user out and not providing any alternatives.
Twice I have had the touchscreen fail on Android devices and been able to get what I needed off them using a USB mouse.
Makes sense why he didn't do this.
People are afraid of AI, but human organizations can be quite opaque as well.
That said, as a Czech, I wouldn't use any accentuated characters in my passwords. Anything beyond 7-bit ASCII is just asking for trouble.
> For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
The user can't even enter their passcode, how do you expect them to perform code execution?
> For the same reason, plugging in an external keyboard is also a no-go since freshly updated iPhones are placed in what's known as a Before First Unlock state, which prevents wired accessories from working until the passcode is entered.
Why can't people read stuff before commenting?
Why can't people read stuff before?
Why can't people read stuff?
Why can't people read?
Why can't people?
Why can't?
Why?
?
I'm basically numb to it at this point though. Every few days we read on this site small permutations of the same story. Sometimes people here get a little extra backchannel support, but that's a token prize for the jester who made a king chuckle.
Then a few more days go by and everyone upvotes a new iWidget to oblivion because it has 0.1 new gigablahs or takes up a milliblah less of some bullshit nobody was asking for.
All while we collectively virtue signal that people are spending too much time and relying on technology too much.
Well, it's almost Monday let's see what new bullshit convinces everyone to keep getting fucked and pay for the privilege.
I basically have turned into this guy: https://youtu.be/8AyVh1_vWYQ
Here's a challenge: walk into a store and attempt to buy a smartphone that is not iPhone or Android.
This is the situation that consumers face. Some alternatives exist, but most consumers are completely unaware of them, because the alternatives have no advertising budget or retail presence.
I think it's quite similar to the political duopoly. Third parties exist, but they have no advertising budget, and moreover, in a Catch-22 situation, they get little or no news coverage, precisely because they have no advertising budget, and thus the news media considers them "not viable." That's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Actually the same situation exists in tech: Apple and Google get huge amounts of free news coverage in addition to their paid advertising. The media appears to feel no obligation to help people escape from duopolies; guess who pays for their advertising...
Want to take pictures? Use a camera. If it somehow auto updates your photos are still on an SD card.
I get convenience has led everyone to expect their phone to do everything for them, but it's not working. When you're in a pinch you will go to a 7-Eleven and grab food, but everyone would agree that buying everything there instead of real groceries is a terrible strategy. Just because something is convenient doesn't mean it's good.
It's mostly working, though. For every story of someone experencing a severe problem, there are millions of non-stories of people not experiencing the problem.
Inconveniencing yourself every day just to avoid the rare situation is not necessarily a great life strategy. Furthermore, most consumers are not as aware of these problem cases as we are. They don't expect the worst until it's too late.
Admittedly, failing to back up is just dumb, and everyone should know that by now. On the other hand, nobody should be expecting that a software update will kill their passcode.
Be aware of characters not passwords. I feel bad for the guy but not really blame Apple here.
English is my second language and ANSI etc is following a basic character usage. Everything must boil down to 0 and 1 in the end or American English.
It is a de facto standard and maybe knowing about it is as crucial as recognizing the difference between the imperial and metric system before heading for the moon. It is a life saver.