What is the Default Charset/Encoding of text messages on Android devices?

Question

If necessary to keep it simple I am primarily concerned with English handsets in North America.

Specifically- when sending/recieving SMS and MMS messages, how are the characters encoded? Is there a difference?

My initial research suggested that UTF-8 was the default, but I have also seen references to US-ASCII for US devices and other charsets for other locales.

Answer 1

Quote:
The platform's default charset is UTF-8. (This is in contrast to some older implementations, where the default charset depended on the user's locale.)

More information can be found here: Charset| Android Developers