One 120 character text msg sent with iPhone5 being received as 3 msgs in wrong order by non-iPhone, how can this be corrected?

[libertyforall]

Anyone else experiencing problem with short text messages (160 or less characters) being broken up into shorter messages and sometimes received in wrong order?  In this example the 3 msgs were received by Boost Mobile Samsung phone but this person does not have this problem when receiving short text messages from others.  Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide me.

[Weth]

Do you have anything in the message besides straight text, such as Emojis on emoticons? If these are sent as graphics, they will take up many characters and the message will be split.

iPhone: SMS messages may display incorrectly on other devices - Apple Support

[libertyforall]

Thanks for the helpful response with link.  The message only contained text no Emojis or emoticons but the 120 text characters did include 4 Spanish language characters with accent such as é.

[Weth]

It would be interesting to see the same message to the same phone without accented characters and see if that keeps the message together. 

[TheNatural]

It's known as Enhanced Messaging Services, this issue is by design and is not a defect with your phone nor an issue with Verizon's network. My girlfriend has AT&T and her text messages I receive are always broken up and out of order. The same thing happens when she receives my text messages on her iPhone from my Galaxy S6, Droid Turbo, HTC One M8, etc. it literally does not matter..... Anything over 160 characters becomes a MMS and they get delivered in the order in which they make it through the MMS queue rather than the order in which they were sent. We just have to live with it until technology gets better or use a 3rd party app like ChompSMS to help fix the issue. CDMA vs GSM technologies plays a role in this as well.

Receiving enhanced messages, like sending them, requires an enhanced-messaging-enabled device. If an enhanced message is sent to a recipient who does not have an enabled device or who is not a Verizon customer, all non-text elements will be removed and the message will be delivered as text-only, in segments of 160 characters each. At times, however, this will result in an unreadable message.

[libertyforall]

So far avoiding accented characters by using English only is keeping the message together.  The iPhone5 was detecting Spanish words and accenting them, will need to check if iPhone5 settings will allow this feature to be disabled on that cellphone.  Thanks again.

[libertyforall]

The 160 character SMS limitation was not a factor in this case.  I noted that I was having this problem with short messages that were 160 characters or less and I used a 120 character message as an example that broke up into 3 messages delivered in the wrong order.  The culprit appears to be the use of accented characters but I don't know if this is triggering the Enhanced Messaging Service that you mentioned.  Messages were broken up and sometimes delivered in wrong order but were always readable.  Thanks for taking the time to respond.