Me, Myself, and A⍰
A bizarre bug is afflicting some iOS 11.1 users: the letter “i” is being autocorrected to the letter “A” followed by a question mark in a box: A⍰. Until Apple can fix the bug in the next update to iOS, the company recommends using iOS’s text replacement feature (Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement) to substitute an uppercase “I” whenever you type a lowercase “i.” How did this get past the beta phase?
The ? in a box represents the Unicode character FE0F, Variation Selector-16, which is supposed to signal that what precedes is displayed as emoji (color) instead of text (black/white). It's never used, however, with letters of the alphabet. I saw one speculation that the bug is caused by something in the machine learning system.
There seems to be another variety of this glitch, where the sender sees things ok but the recipient sees "I䷀".
I️ ran into this for the first time today. Apparently I’m getting a variant on the “A”.
Here's xkcd's take on this strange bug.
https://xkcd.com/1913/
New update from apple to fix it
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208240