Old iPhone bug continues to drop last word from some iMessages

iMessage bug (lost words)

As if the now regular outages weren’t enough, an old and utterly bizarreĀ bug continues to plague Apple’s iMessage service, one that deletes the last word of certain texts and iMessages.

The issue actually raised its ugly head last December, but blew up recently as many disgruntled usersĀ took to Twitter to complain about the hiccup. The problem appears to manifest itself with certain phrases and certain words only.

Exhibit A: sending someone “I could be the next Obama” followed by a trailing space could result in “Obama” being hidden from the received message. Instead of “Obama”, theĀ recipient gets a big blank space where ā€œObamaā€ should be.Ā Likewise, sending “The best prize is a surprise” could similarly result in “surprise” being dropped on the recipient’s side…

The problem is documented on The Verge forumsĀ and while the publication claims that the finalĀ word vanishes on both ends, my experience is somewhat different.

As you can see in the top right screenshots representing an exchange between Sebastien and myself, sometimes the message containing the phrase which triggers the phenomenon would go through as intended.

In most cases, however, the final word indeed gets dropped.

The Verge explains:

Everything looks fine until you hit the “send” button, after which – on both screens – the final word vanishes and is replaced with blank space.

Oddly, copying and pasting the message (blank text and all) reveals the original composition. We’ve been able to confirm the strange issue firsthand on various iPhones.

Unlike The Verge, the final word did notĀ disappearĀ on my end even though iMessage hid itĀ from communication on Sebastien’s end.

That the message doesn’t get truncated in Notification Center suggest a problem with Apple’ stock Messages application and not with the iMessage backend or the iOS operation system itself.

Specifically, the Messages app seems to exhibit some kind of a rendering issue because copying and pasting the offending message does display the original content.

This oddĀ bug was first described on Apple’s support forums in December 2012, with users reporting aboutĀ iMessages sent from Mac OS X Mountain Lion to an iPhone occasionally appearing with words cut off from the end.

iMessage bug (lost words 002)

Ostensibly, it’s an iPhone-specific problem because the iPad doesn’t appear to be affected, perĀ another thread on Apple’s support forums.

iDB’s testing suggests not everyone isĀ necessarilyĀ affected by the issue: a bunch of people I tested the bug with did receive theĀ aforementionedĀ phrases on their iPhones in their entirety.

Your mileage might vary so please report about your experience down in the comments.