Why is the navigation bar, and other UI elements in, I wanna say Mandarin?

the chinese bots have taken over 😔.

I must admit, the symbols look very cool!

@joewilliams007 you should consider adding that "feature" to your android devrant app :)

Because you are squinting too much.

@nbvmkrzrcnfohy "edgy" humor stopped being funny a decade ago dude.

Apparently, this happens if you use 16-bit encoding in your text and you lose a byte so the alignment is off. Not entirely sure how that effects icons like this, but that's at least one way how text can turn Chinese.

It's a bug in DevRant App for sure.

It seems like the wrong font gets chosen at startup, kinda like a race condition / fallback thing.

If you close the app and restart, everything's fine usually.

Mostly happens (thus my guess regarding race condition) when the dev is slow to start up

Byte order mismatch. These particular Chinese characters have all-zero lower bytes so if you flip the endianness of normal English text it does that.

Also happens if a byte gets lost in UTF16, but errors in transit are vastly less likely than errors in interpretation so I say it's endianness.

On the other hand, the symbols are supposed to be in the private use area of Unicode so that's a riddle.

@lorentz endianness is another option but I couldn't figure how it could happen only sometimes. Everything is possible, I suppose.

@electrineer A library needs to be imperatively configured to follow a particular byte order. Android provides multiple distinct entry points to an app corresponding to different combinations of available vs empty/lost states of data and parameters. Some of these fail to initialize the library.

C# loves imperative initialization, often mislabeled as a builder. I imagine Java does too.