Google Responds to SMS Android Bug

[danDroid]

Last week news broke of an Android SMS bug that caused certain Android Phones to send SMS text messages to the wrong person. According to Google's bug-tracking system a response has been posted for users that experienced the problem...

Thanks to everyone for your patience while we’ve been investigating these reports. As it turns out, we believe there are two distinct situations being discussed on this issue chain. Fortunately, we have fixes for both of them.

When some users tap to open a message in the Messaging application, they’re seeing a different message appear instead. We don’t believe this issue is affecting many users, but we’ve developed a fix that we’re preparing to deploy. Of course, double-checking the displayed message before hitting “Send” will prevent any messages from being sent to the wrong recipients. We’ve found in testing this issue, it is more likely to occur if you tap on a message before the Messaging app is fully loaded, so we recommend waiting for all the elements to load before clicking on the message you want to display.

Separately, some users have reported that their SMS messages are being delivered to the wrong people. It took us some time to reproduce this issue, as it appears that it’s only occurring very rarely. Even so, we’ve now managed to both reproduce it and develop a fix that we will deploy.

While we don’t anticipate any persistent problems, we’ll continue to investigate in case we come up with additional ways to trigger these bugs. Thanks again for helping us improve Android.

Source: Issue 9392 - android - SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact. - Project Hosting on Google Code

 

[furbearingmammal]

Glad to see Google has the users' back when it comes to bugs like this. Hopefully the fixes will be pushed to us soon.

 

[csimo]

Glad to see Google has the users' back when it comes to bugs like this. Hopefully the fixes will be pushed to us soon.

I don't think Google has a way to do this since the problem is not in an app, but the OS itself. The patch can be released via the Android Open Source Project, but it will be up to each manufacturer to pick it up and decide if they want to release a patch. That could take from weeks to months or never in some cases.

In the case of the Nexus it will probably happen pretty fast. Other phones... who knows if ever.

Sure hope I'm wrong.

-Joe

 

[Game4set]

Glad to see Google has the users' back when it comes to bugs like this. Hopefully the fixes will be pushed to us soon.

I don't think Google has a way to do this since the problem is not in an app, but the OS itself. The patch can be released via the Android Open Source Project, but it will be up to each manufacturer to pick it up and decide if they want to release a patch. That could take from weeks to months or never in some cases.

In the case of the Nexus it will probably happen pretty fast. Other phones... who knows if ever.

Sure hope I'm wrong.

-Joe

Well hopefully Google will put out the texting app on the Android Market just like what they've been doing with other built in apps (Gmail, Voice Search, Car Home, etc)

 

[Game4set]

Glad to see Google has the users' back when it comes to bugs like this. Hopefully the fixes will be pushed to us soon.

I don't think Google has a way to do this since the problem is not in an app, but the OS itself. The patch can be released via the Android Open Source Project, but it will be up to each manufacturer to pick it up and decide if they want to release a patch. That could take from weeks to months or never in some cases.

In the case of the Nexus it will probably happen pretty fast. Other phones... who knows if ever.

Sure hope I'm wrong.

-Joe

Well hopefully Google will put out the texting app on the Android Market just like what they've been doing with other built in apps (Gmail, Voice Search, Car Home, etc).

 

[wierdo124]

Yeah i really hope they just throw the MMS.apk on the market. Heck, while they're at it, might as well overhaul the whole damned app...

 

[csimo]

I'm not an expert on this, but I have talked with someone that is supposed to be in the know on this issue.

The stock text messaging app does not actually send or receive the text messages. Just as Handcent doesn't. Both rely on a text messaging library of the OS itself. That's why using Handcent, or Chomp doesn't solve the problem.

The issue is with with OS itself, and an app won't fix the problem. At least that's what I was told.

If someone has more insight on this issue please chime in.

-Joe

 

[furbearingmammal]

I'm not an expert on this, but I have talked with someone that is supposed to be in the know on this issue.

The stock text messaging app does not actually send or receive the text messages. Just as Handcent doesn't. Both rely on a text messaging library of the OS itself. That's why using Handcent, or Chomp doesn't solve the problem.

The issue is with with OS itself, and an app won't fix the problem. At least that's what I was told.

If someone has more insight on this issue please chime in.

-Joe

That would make sense. However, that means that the update would have to be pushed by Moto and/or Verizon and THAT means either it'll wait till the Gingerbread update for you X'ers and D2'ers, or that you'll get an update fairly soon that will fix that problem and probably plug yet another rooting hole.