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Text messages from my iPhone to my friend's Android phone do not stay in the 160 characters as sent. Sometimes they appear as two or three separate texts when they are received.

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This is normal functionality and has been present on the original iPhone OS on the very first iPhone back in 2007.

What you are seeing is that the iPhone is allowing you to send messages that are longer than the SMS limit, and when you do that it automatically splits the message into the number of SMS messages required to send your message.

If your recipient has an iPhone, they just see the original un-split message as the iPhone puts it back together for the recipient. Other devices, such as your friend's Android device, just show the discrete SMS messages in the order they were sent.

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That's not quite correct - you're implying that the iPhone has this functionality, whereas others don't. In fact, Concatenated SMS (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS) has been around since before the iPhone came along. Most modern phones, especially Android phones, implement this too. It's more likely that there are incompatibilities between the sender and receiver's network. – Andrew Ferrier Dec 23 '12 at 12:43
@AndrewFerrier reading up on this in the past when I worked for a company that sent SMS for a living (via mBlox), its been quite an issue with android phones not in fact receiving SMS in this fashion and only 3rd party apps supporting it correctly. You are also quite right that the different networks encode and send SMS differently so that it could in fact be that as a cause. No way to tell really without further information on Android/Phone versions. Either way I stick by my answer. – Stu Wilson Dec 24 '12 at 18:15

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