So I texted my sister something completely normal on Wednesday night — "im on my way, be there in 10" — and what she actually got was "Am on my way, be there A[] 10." That bracket thing isn't me being cute with formatting either, it's a literal broken glyph, this little rectangle with a question mark in it that shows up whenever autocorrect tries and fails to turn a lowercase "i" into a capital "I." She texted back "???" and honestly I don't blame her.
This is the iOS 11 autocorrect bug that's apparently been going around for about a week now, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it. Type a plain lowercase i on its own, hit space, and instead of the normal capitalization you get "A" followed by that weird missing-character box. It's not every i, which somehow makes it worse: it's inconsistent enough that you stop trusting your own keyboard. I've caught myself proofreading texts like I'm back in high school English class, which defeats the entire point of autocorrect existing in the first place.
From what I can tell reading around, this traces back to something broken in the predictive text / QuickType dictionary that iOS 11 ships with, not anything users are doing wrong. Apple's apparently aware of it and has said a fix is coming, but as of right now, Monday, nothing's landed yet. My phone is still doing it. I checked twice this morning just to be sure and yep, still broken.
I've had an iPhone 7 Plus since last year and I genuinely can't remember the last software bug that was this visible and this annoying at the same time. Most iOS bugs are the kind where some obscure setting doesn't stick, or Bluetooth drops for a second, stuff a normal person never notices. This one shows up in literally every conversation you have over text, which if you're like me is most of my communication with actual humans some days. My workaround for the last few days has been typing "I" capitalized myself every single time, which sounds small but is the kind of tiny friction that adds up over a hundred texts a day.
Somebody on Twitter figured out (or at least claims) it's connected to how the dictionary handles a corrupted entry tied to predictive suggestions, possibly from some emoji-prediction trick going around a while back where people were tricking the keyboard into suggesting certain characters. I have no way to verify that and honestly don't care that much about the root cause, I just want it fixed. iOS updates used to feel like they came out whenever Apple felt like it, and now with the 11.0.1 fix apparently in the works, everyone's just sitting here waiting, refreshing Settings > General > Software Update like that'll make it show up faster. It won't. I've tried.
Separately, and unrelated except that it's also an iOS 11-adjacent annoyance: my Apple Watch Series 3 has been dropping its wifi connection at home randomly since I set it up two weeks ago, which I guess other people are also seeing. Between that and the keyboard thing I'm starting to wonder if this release just needed another couple weeks in the oven. iOS 11 itself I actually like a lot, the redesigned Control Center is genuinely better and I've been using the new screen recording feature constantly, but the last stretch of any big OS rollout always seems to be these weird little papercuts that nobody caught in beta because nobody types "i" by itself enough times in the beta testing window, apparently.
Anyway. If you've got an iPhone on iOS 11 and your texts have been coming out looking like ransom notes lately, it's not you, it's not your phone specifically, it's just a bug going around. Capitalize your own "I"s for a few more days. Apple says a fix is coming. We'll see.