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summary
- Strange question marks are appearing in texts sent from iPhones to Android phones, affecting some Canadian carriers.
- Adding special characters or emojis may temporarily resolve the issue, but the cause remains unknown.
- Apple announced RCS support for iPhones in iOS 18, which will improve the text messaging experience on these platforms, but it’s not yet available to the public.
Currently, text messaging between iPhone and Android users is not a great experience. These text messages rely on SMS or MMS protocols, which are less secure than RCS as they do not support end-to-end encryption. The RCS protocol also offers a range of features that are expected to be available to users in 2024, such as read and write receipts, group chats, emoji reactions, and support for sending and receiving high-resolution photos. iPhone users can access all the above features, but only when sending text messages to other iPhone users via iMessage or using third-party messaging services such as WhatsApp.
After years of complaints from both sides involved, Apple finally caved and at its recently held annual Worldwide Developers Conference, the Cupertino-based tech giant announced that RCS support will be coming to iPhones in iOS 18. However, a stable OS build is still months away, likely to be released in September, so until then, the messaging experience between Android and iOS devices will likely continue to be poor.
Related
How the iPhone’s RCS implementation will impact Android
We are still in the green bubble, but the picture should no longer be blurry
A new issue is emerging where strange question marks appear in texts sent from an iPhone to an Android device, likely due to texts relying on the SMS protocol. This appears to be an issue limited to a few carriers in Canada, and only occurs when an iPhone user sends a text message to an Android user, but not vice versa.
Reports of the issue have appeared on the Pixel, Samsung Galaxy, and Koodo (Canadian carrier) subreddits, with multiple users expressing their frustration: “My husband has a Google Pixel and this morning all the spaces and the letter d turned into question marks,” “It’s happening to me and one of my friends but not the other. We both have iPhones and I have Android,” “I’m having the same issue and it’s really hard to read a lot of the text and it’s frustrating,” “Oh my God, this is happening to me too. I have an iPhone and my husband has a Samsung. How do I fix this? It’s so frustrating,” are just some of the comments on Reddit about the issue, suggesting that Bell, Telus, and Rogers users are all affected.
There may be a temporary solution
It doesn’t work reliably, but adding special characters like “&” or emojis seems to temporarily fix the issue. I speak from my own experience, and several users on Reddit have said the same thing. In a brief text conversation with MobileSyrup Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Lamont, who was using a Pixel 8a, messages sent from his iPhone showed strange question marks, as seen in the screenshot above. Both Jon and I live in Canada and are on one of the carriers that appears to be affected. Messages received on the iPhone appear as intended.
It’s unclear at this time whether this is a Google issue or just a problem with a specific carrier. We tried to replicate the issue in the US, but were unsuccessful.
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