When sharing my location via the Messages app, other people see a thumbnail with Chinese text for my location

I have reproduced this issue with four or five different people all of whom have different software installed. This is an Apple issue and has nothing to do with third-party software, it only happens with the stock Apple app messages.

I reset my location privacy settings today but still have the issue. My girlfriend makes fun of me saying “why are you at that Chinese food massage place again”.

The way iOS works, apps are "sandboxed" and a third party app isn't physically able to modify the OS level functionality (Location Services, Find Friends etc). If we were sharing our location through a third party messages app that would be another thing, but we're using the native Apple functionality so it can't be connected to third party apps. Now, malware or viruses are a different story, but no app distributed through Apple's App Store could modify Location Services or Find Friends, and I don't know of any Malware that can mess with Location Services. Due to the fact that I only use a few Apple approved apps, I doubt I have any Malware.

One thing I think is curious is that all of these locations are in Hong Kong, and the default locations for testing location aware apps in Xcode (Apple's App development environment) is Hong Kong. While your phone is connected to Xcode, you can simulate a location such as Hong Kong so while you are testing your app. Basically Xcode can make your phone think it's in Hong Kong, that way you if say you're developing a mapping app that works around the world you can see how it would look to users in other countries. I tried testing my own app and simulating the location as Mexico City to see if it would fool my phone into sending Mexico City locations instead of Hong Kong locations as thumbnails in Messages but it didn't work - it still ends Hong Kong locations. My though is it might be a bug where Apple forgot to remove some code they added to Messages for testing location sharing. I'm not absolutely sure if this is the case, and I am not sure why this issue presents itself to only certain people, or why the locations in Hong Kong change over time.

No response to my bug report. I actually have two iPhones and I am a developer. It happened both on my phone running iOS 11 and my phone running iOS 12 beta, so since it wasn't fixed in iOS12 I submitted my bug report there, as Apple is probably more actively working on iOS 12 at this point.

Apparently Evisu is a shop that sells designer Japanese blue jeans in Hong Kong.

I tested it with my girlfriend an hour ago and that time my location sent her her properly but her location sent to me as the Japanese denim shop. 😮

The strangest thing about this bug is everyone who experiences it gets the same chinese characters but they change over time. One day it's a spa, the next it's a restaurant, the next it's a clothing store. But we all get the same thing!

I am wondering if everyone who experiences this issue has anything in common. Are you using an iPhone X? Are you a developer? What else could we have in common that might explain why the two of us have this issue but many other people don't.