Following a campaign by users, Google has uprated a bug that causes Android phones to send text messages to the wrong people, raising hopes of a speedy fix.
The bug, which sends SMS text messages to the wrong recipient, while reporting they have been sent properly, could have serious consequences for users, but was labelled as “medium” in Google’s forums for six months. An Internet campaign, prompted by Google’s inaction, has got the bug upgraded to “critical” but there is still no word on when it will be fixed.
Although some sources suggest it won’t be rife in the UK, a staff member in the eWEEK UK office was hit by the bug before Christmas – thankfully without sending any embarassing messages to the wrong people.
When it strikes, text messages are sent to random recipients, although they still appear in the correct thread of the phone’s message display. Only by opening the message details can the error be found – by which time it is obviously too late.
Six months on, with no action from Google, forum user authorwjf said: “I think the only way we are going to get this fixed is to just blast it all over the internet”. Over the New Year period, the bug was “starred” by nearly 7,000 people, and attracted around 1,400 comments, all demanding that Google should respond to the issue.
“This is akin to an alarm clock that occasionally won’t go off,” said Engadget’s Chris Ziegler, referring to the iPhone’s alarm clock problem, which left users sleeping when the clocks changed for Summer Time, and did the same thing on New Year’s day, “or a car that randomly won’t let you turn the steering wheel – you simply cannot have a phone that you can’t trust to communicate with the right people. It’s a deal-breaker.”
“We’re pretty shocked that these issues weren’t tied up and blasted to all affected phones as an over-the-air patch months ago,” said Ziegler.
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Some detailed facts:
most people commenting on bug report had never experienced the issue;
a large proportion of the people commenting on the bug didn't even own an Android phone;
some commenters noted that despite being prolific texters themselves they had never experienced an issue.
If you take the time to read through the comment stream (I read really, really fast...), you find a few more insightful comments. A couple of them link the problem to the notifier panel, when there are a lot of notifications, suggesting that clicking on a notification can actually take you to a different "thread" (SMS doesn't do threads in reality). If you then text a reply without looking at the thread you could send the text to that thread.
So a minor bug at worst, reflecting the tiny number of people reporting it - relative to the 47m Android handsets sold in 2010. Even the Facebook page couldn't get a lot of fans...
Chris, no need to be a Google apologist. This is a serious issue. It affects my 2.1 Hero and I even sent a (thankfully innocuous) text to my ex instead of my wife the other day.
My bug occurs when selecting a contact and then tapping "send text". Occasionally (seemingly randomly) the wrong thread will open and it has nothing to do with how many notifications are present. I think there is more than one bug as other users have reported different behaviour but, needless to say, this is a fundamental flaw and should have been prioritised by Google a lot sooner.
Incidentally I raised two calls with HTC, which were both closed because they couldn't recreate the issue but surely they were getting plenty of similar complaints?