JSON Invalid UTF-8 middle byte

JSON data must be encoded as UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32. The JSON decoder can determine the encoding by examining the first four octets of the byte stream:

       00 00 00 xx  UTF-32BE
       00 xx 00 xx  UTF-16BE
       xx 00 00 00  UTF-32LE
       xx 00 xx 00  UTF-16LE
       xx xx xx xx  UTF-8

It sounds like the server is encoding data in some illegal encoding (ISO-8859-1, windows-1252, etc.)

I got this exception when in the Java Client Application I was serializing a JSON like this

String json = mapper.writeValueAsString(contentBean);

and on the Server Side I was using Spring Boot as REST Endpoint. Exception was:

nested exception is com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException: Invalid UTF-8 start byte 0xaa

My problem was, that I was not setting the correct encoding on the HTTP Client. This solved my problem:

updateRequest.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/json;charset=UTF-8");
StringEntity entity= new StringEntity(json, "UTF-8");
updateRequest.setEntity(entity);

Android set content type HttpPost