> because SMS, uses a variant of UTF-16 from the era when people thought 16 bits was big enough SMS uses 7-bit by default. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03

> because SMS, uses a variant of UTF-16 from the era when people thought 16 bits was big enough SMS uses 7-bit by default. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38#GSM_7-bit_default_alphabet_and_extension_table_of_3GPP_TS_23.038_.2F_GSM_03.38 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38#GSM_7-bit_default_al... Hacks? It's called UTF-16 surrogate pair. Not hacks. UCS-2 officially, but UCS-2 has been legacy for almost 20 years now. Modern phones select the encoding dynamically and use UTF-16 if the message cannot be encoded otherwise. You'll get up to 160 7-bit characters (some symbols take two characters) or 70 UTF-16 code units in unicode mode. I just wish everyone started to use UTF-8 already and dropped all the other nonsense.