Sent text messages are turning into Chinese

I had a chat session with apple and seems to have fixed my issue.

1. Go here https://appleid.apple.com/#!&page=signin

2. Sign in, and then choose security, then change password.

3. Go into four different places, and sign out and then back in with your new password on your iPhone.

5. Start with settings, then messages. Once there, tap on send / receive and then tap on your Apple Id. Sign out and back in.

6. Once you have done that, we want to do the same with FaceTime, and also with iCloud, and iTunes store.

This fixed things for me. However I made a mistake when I was testing it. I coped and pasted the message I sent earlier that screwed up. Well it went thru Chinese again. So retyped the message and then also typed a bunch of other messages to other people I had the issue with and all went thru perfectly. So I don't know if copying and pasting the messed up message copied the problem or what. Apple said they are aware of the problem. I hope this helps someone else.

IIt's an encoding glitch affecting quite a few users which Apple or someone else has to fix.

This is a character encoding issue that currently seems specific to AT&T! I recently wrote a detailed post about this issue, what's causing it, and what to do about it. You can read it here:

http://poetryproseandpoppycock.blogspot.com/2016/10/solved-mark-and-mystery-of-o verly.html.

I tend to write in a humorous, yet informative style because tech-talk can get way too dry. Enjoy the fix!

Sam Martin wrote:

Edit: Found this StackExchange answer. Sounds like the problem is on the receiving end, rather than the iPhone as I’d assumed.

It's definitely and encoding glitch, where some characters are added to messages and then missread at other end as UTF-16. But not so clear where the problem is. Seems to have arisen after recent iOS update, so Apple may have role.

Sam Martin wrote:

What seems to be happening is iOS adds a “@” (U+0040) between each character before sending, and the receiving device converts this from UTF-8 to UTF-16. For instance, “Hello” gets sent as “H@e@l@l@o@”, which—when encoded as UTF-8 and read as UTF-16—renders as “䁈䁥䁬䁬䁯”.

This is indeed how all the texts I have decoded are structured. But I am not sure where the @ gets added or how the message gets marked as utf-16, as I think I have read that recipients with iOS devices don't always have the wrong display (neither extra @'s nor Chinese).

Apple put out an update (10.0.3) which I just installed. The problem still exists. For me emoji has nothing to do with it. The only keyboard I have is english. Here is what I have found out.

1. Only seems to effect text messages longer than 2 lines.

2. Does not seem to effect iMessages.

3. Does not matter the receiving device.

Apparently, the update did not fix the problem. This is really getting on my nerves. I spend all day at my desk and communicate with people in the field thru text.

The problem does not happen with emoji. Seems to only happen with messages longer than a few lines. Seems also to only happen to SMS messages, not iMessage. Happens if I send to an android or iphone with SMS and longer than 3 lines.

How do I also file a bug report?

I contacted Apple because this started happening to me last week, and the senior advisor I talked to gathered the info, gave it to his engineers, and they got back to me just now saying it is a problem with the carrier. In my case, I have AT&T (is that your carrier as well?). I am going to call them today to see if there is any way to fix it!

I also have this same issue and I have NOT upgraded to iOS 10. I'm running iOS 9.3.5 on my iPhone 6 and twice now to 2 different people (with non-iPhones) my texts have converted to chinese. Both contain an emoji and were longer than 2 lines. I also have AT&T. I tested the same message without an emoji and it went through.