> 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?
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Someone on twitter had the idea that he could use the camera to take a picture of the character (or his whole password) and copy/paste it using the built-in ocr feature.
I don't have a text password on my iphone so I don't know whether you can paste into that field.
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
Tangentially related, a relative bought a new Apple laptop a few weeks ago, and I was tasked with setting it up. The computer came pre-equipped with a Czech keyboard (apparently the US models weren't in stock and that relative needed a new computer as soon as possible, so they bought a Czech one).
Since the user doesn't speak Czech, I promptly removed the Czech layout and installed two other layouts, US English and Hebrew, for the languages that the relative uses to type on the computer.
For some reason, login screen just after boot still uses Czech layout, which means Z and Y are swapped and numbers must be typed with Shift (just pressing numbers outputs Czech letters like ěščř). So when booting up the machine (remember that you can't use fingerprint during first unlock), the user must type the password in whatever layout is physically printed on the keys, even though the rest of the OS doesn't even have a mention of that layout. Somehow afterwards the OS "can" see the list of the layouts and lock screen correctly chooses the English US layout.
Alongside of that, for some reason, the key that's supposed to type ` and ~ in the US layout types some nonsense instead (a plus-minus sign and a section sign), whereas the backtick key is for some reason located between left Shift and Z (good luck unlearning years of muscle memory typing ~/Documents in the terminal)
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
226 comments
> 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?
Then he couldn’t login, because login screen does not have a special character keyboard.
EDIT: found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10742351 (apparently I remember it slightly wrong, but idea still the same)
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.
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.
> your lifetime customer value is less than the cost of a single support call
yes that is the pattern, pioneered by Google here in California
> You never know what the "big players" are going to pull,
When one pays 1000 Euros for a product, one expects a basic level of quality.
Or release some sort of open version once device is EOL'd.
Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave if he could see the software quality of the products that Apple releases today.
> Byrne was hoping that the next update, 26.4.1, would introduce a fix for this, but its release this week has not helped.
Even if Apple restores the háček in a future update, wouldn't he still need to unlock the iPhone to install it?
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...
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.
Twice I have had the touchscreen fail on Android devices and been able to get what I needed off them using a USB mouse.
Just interns pushing to prod without any review? What the hell is going on in the software industry?
Such mistakes a trillion dollar company can not allow to happen.
I don't have a text password on my iphone so I don't know whether you can paste into that field.
Since the user doesn't speak Czech, I promptly removed the Czech layout and installed two other layouts, US English and Hebrew, for the languages that the relative uses to type on the computer.
For some reason, login screen just after boot still uses Czech layout, which means Z and Y are swapped and numbers must be typed with Shift (just pressing numbers outputs Czech letters like ěščř). So when booting up the machine (remember that you can't use fingerprint during first unlock), the user must type the password in whatever layout is physically printed on the keys, even though the rest of the OS doesn't even have a mention of that layout. Somehow afterwards the OS "can" see the list of the layouts and lock screen correctly chooses the English US layout.
Alongside of that, for some reason, the key that's supposed to type ` and ~ in the US layout types some nonsense instead (a plus-minus sign and a section sign), whereas the backtick key is for some reason located between left Shift and Z (good luck unlearning years of muscle memory typing ~/Documents in the terminal)
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?
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
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.