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

Yep that’s the same one I’m getting. It

Translates to “Japanese restaurant”.

I wonder why everybody stopped getting “Hong Kong foot massage spa” and started getting “Japanese restaurant” for their thumbnail.

I don’t use any of those messaging apps - native or otherwise. They’ve all been disabled since I installed iOS 11 a year ago wnd I have a minimal installation on my phone. I looked in there just now and everything is disabled that can be disabled and has been since this issue presented itself.

I am 100% positively absolutely without a doubt sure that third party apps and messages add on apps aren’t the problem here.

When I reset my location privacy settings, that basically, that turns off location services for all apps and then each app needs to manually be re authorized. I did that and still had this problem.

It’s clear to me that the problem is NOT RELATED TO THIRD PARTY APPS. It’s an Apple software bug and I’ve filed a bug report for it via my developer account. If anybody comes up with a practical workaround, please let me know.

Its very curious to to me that we were all getting the same foot spa message and now we are all getting the same japanese restaurant message. That tells me that it’s affecing all of us with this issue the same way despite our various software installations and configurations.

I might actually try that. I’m not using the find friends app but I know messages send location feature and find friends are integrated such that when I receive a friend‘s location via message it also shows up find friends.

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.

The really bizzare part is how it changes with time. Like today EVERYONE who has this issue gets evisu, other days everyone gets sushi etc. There's a time component that makes it a real puzzle.

So we're both using an X. I wonder if everybody else who has this issue is using an X.

It's definitely not related to third party software, so I am wondering what else we might have in common. I'm using Verizon not T-Mobile btw.

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.

Today it said (again in Chinese characters) that I was in a Japanese restaurant when I shared my location from a road in Downtown Houston.

和食居