If you’re using an Apple device running iOS 11.0.3 or 11.1, you may have noticed some oddities when sending text messages. For reasons that aren’t quite clear, the letter “I” is being replaced by the characters “A[?].” It’s not a game-breaking bug, but it is annoying, and if you’re not paying attention, it can make for some rather mystifying text messages.
Fortunately, Apple is on the case, and the company has announced that they’ll have a fix for the issue in their next release. If you’d rather not wait, there are several things you can do in the meantime to work around the issue. In no particular order, these are:
• Simply disable Apple’s predictive text auto-correct feature. If you rely on it frequently, this may slow you down some, but is probably the most straightforward approach to take at the moment.
• Install a third-party keyboard app because these use their own predictive text features.
• Or, take Apple’s recommendation and set up a text replacement rule (essentially replacing “I” with “I”).
If you opt for this last approach, you’ll want to go into your phone’s settings, look under the general tab, then keyboard, and choose “Text Replacement.”
Tap the plus sign (+), then, for “phrase,” type in an upper case “I”. For shortcut, type a lower-case “I.”
Save that change, and you should be all set.
To reiterate, this isn’t a huge deal, and it’s hard to see how this could cause anything but a bit of annoyance and perhaps a few scattered miscommunications. Even so, if you send more than a handful of text messages during the course of a typical business day, it’s probably worth spending a few minutes implementing one of these simple workarounds until Apple can ride to the rescue with a permanent fix.
