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Android Text Messages Intermittently Going Astray
theodp writes "Reports from Engadget and others suggest that Tiger Woods and Brett Favre might want to avoid Android for the time being. It seems Android's default text messaging app still has horrible text messaging bugs that can that intermittently send texts to the wrong person. 'This is ticking me off like no other technology glitch that I experienced in recent years,' reads one unhappy camper's post on a lengthy Help Forum thread opened on March 16th. 'If a bank deposited my paycheck into another person's account I wouldn't stress so much cause I can always get the money back. How the hell do you take words back? "Oh sorry boss you had to find out that I think you're an idiot, can I still keep my job, please please please?"' Over at Google Code, Issue 9392 — SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact — carries a priority of 'Medium,' even though it has 600+ comments and has been starred by 3,600+ people."
So fix it yourself.
#DeleteChrome
Hey Larry there's this bitching party down town tonight with strippers and blow!
!
sent from my android
Eventually, Google may have to realize that some of their products actually require customer support.
but not a performance or security related issue.
Randomly sending SMS messages to the wrong recipient is a huge performance and security bug. Performance: if the intended recipient does not get the message, the phone is not performing a basic function correctly and the effective messaging performance is zero. Security: It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that sending SMS messages to the wrong people could definitely have a negative effect on user privacy, making this a BIG security bug.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I can tell you right now that if Microsoft Outlook had a bug that sent emails to random contacts, we would not be seeing comments that say "Never happened to me, so not an issue" or "Don't blame Microsoft, there are other clients available."
Oh, and the "fix it yourself" people need to shut the fuck up too. That's fine when it's an open-source project with fifty users hosted on sourceforge, not when it's in-production software that runs on millions and millions of phones.
No, it is not a fat finger issue. It IS sending messages to the wrong recipient without notification, and even sorting them in a different thread than where it was sent; there are steps to reproduce in the bug report. Your assumptions about the issues are misleading others just as badly as FUD could.
There appear to be a few failure modes; the one we definitely experience on the Gingerbread-powered Nexus S involves being routed to the wrong thread when you tap it either in the Notifications list or the master thread list in the Messaging application, so if you don't notice, you'll end up firing a message to the wrong person.
Not sure whether to file this under FUD, but the error isn't nearly as sensational as the title or summary seem to indicate. Certainly an issue if it turns out that presses are being fuzzed out to different locations than intended, but very possibly an issue of "fat fingers" on the part of customers.
Fat fingers can't explain why messages that the phone logs as having been sent to person A are in fact sent to person B, which some people have reported.
However rarely this bug strikes, it is something that should never happen, and it is definitely a showstopper bug for many many users.
Ahem! FTFA: where sent text messages can appear to be in the correct thread and still end up being sent to another contact altogether. In other words, unless you pull up the Message Details screen after the fact, you might not even know the grievous act you've committed until your boss, significant other, or best friend -- make that former best friend -- texts you back.
Apparently you have a whole other bug than what is being reported. If the bug was what you had mentioned then the bug should be reported as the wrong contact opening, not the wrong contact getting a text.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I don't know why you ever thought Google wasn't worse. Microsoft is great at implementing software (i.e. features). I really can't think of a better company at that. Where they usually fail is in the concept stage, esp. regarding security. Google is much better at that (from an architecture/focus standpoint) even though their software has [a lot] more bugs.
If a portion of your user population has enough trouble with your UI that they are 'fat fingering' their way into trouble, then at some point it is _your_ issue.
But that having been said, a quick glance through the support thread shows things like this: "http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=345259e6d424bad3&fid=345259e6d424bad300048dfbff785d0c&hltp=2"
The code reverses the numbers before doing its (loose) compare... so uses the 7 last digits.
Bob - 408-555-1234
Fred - 510-555-1234
become
4321-555-804
4321-555-015
And it only uses the first 7 digits, which for both numbers, is "4321555"...
So if you send a message to Fred, and it looks in the cache for the contact, there's a chance it will go to Bob.
It seems you consider sending personal data to the wrong destination "not a security issue." Messages are information. Login details routinely travel over them, like when you're resetting a password or something... now you can't know if it really travelled to the right person. If this were SSL you'd be yelling "man in the middle" attack.
No it does not affect the Google voice client. That is all internet based... (except for obviously the end point). Its important to note this is only on certain builds. My G1 has never done this...
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
If it doesn't send them to someone random it will just delete all of them. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669 That's also labled as medium.
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/packages/apps/Mms.git;a=commit;h=7bb3d8cf74ec1e4ae18cb814c17e12a00816f105
Though I guess it'll take a while to get into builds/updates for existing handsets.
But not as bad as the HTC 911 issues
Sending messages to the right contact and making sure 911 calls work are things OS makers should go out of their way to ensure work correctly
Do mobile vendors QA their products anymore?
Meh, information wants to be free. It's not like your personal communications will harm the world. Why aren't you just being open and honest to begin with?
This also shows up when a message is sent to someone for whom you have two or more cellphone numbers. I saw a message I had sent my son at his foreign cellphone number (by mistake) coming up as a new thread, which I knew was "wrong". I re-sent it to his local cellphone number and it filed correctly. But both threads had the same name title, and did not have anything to distinguish them (a UI error: they should have the class of device appended in parentheses when the recipient has more than one SMS-capable device).
But if the messages are going to entirely different people, I'd suspect a match routine error, and I'd want to check the code and the data for character-set encoding problems. I would hope by now that everything is UTF-8, but if this stuff was coded by people whose sole language is English, all bets are off.
Ok, I'll agree that this seems to be an important issue, but the 700 me-toos in a 24 hour period on the issue isn't going to help anybody.
Go ahead and star the issue if you'd like (and enjoy reading the resulting 700 emails you'll get every day from the idiots shouting "this is important). But, there are better ways to get the issue escalated than to spam the bug. This just makes it that much harder for anybody actually working on the problem to fix it. Also, anybody who did care about the issue and who was working on it probably will take their names off the bug as soon as they get into work next week, or at least hit the mute button on the conversation thread in gmail.
If somebody spammed a bug of mine on an open source project like this I'd do two things:
1. Fix the bug.
2. Ban anybody from the bugzilla who posted a me-too.
Me-toos that include helpful step-by-step reproduction scripts, core dumps with symbols, insightful analysis, or whatever are of course perfectly welcome. "This is important!!!" is just whining - yes, it is important, now go find something productive to do...
there are steps to reproduce in the bug report
False. From the linked bug report:
Interestingly, has never occurred on my other Nexus running the same FRF50 build.
Basically, he says he *can't* reproduce the bug on just any device. Only on one particular device.
Nokia has a wide assortment of phones which do just that, and cost $50 or less to boot (without contract).
Surely this adds to the case for Android device manufacturers should be working together on a standard Android distribution, rather than on their own fragmented and mangled versions.
They should accept they are just producing hardware, and that the Android customisations are irrelavent (much as it is with Windows laptops and vendor supplied crapware). Because they all produce customised versions of everything and stop supporting them as soon as the new hardware is released these bugs are going to exist in existing Android handsets for a long time, potentially forever.
This bug is pretty bad also. Someone should add the link to the original post. When you have 20mb of internal memory left or less, you can't receive any SMS anymore. Also the SMS message is lost forever. Seems there's a duplicate entry: Issue 11045: cannot receive SMS messages when internal memory is low http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=11045 Issue 4991: Can not receive SMS when internal memory is low. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4991
It has ALREADY been fixed by the community.
None of the dozen or so SMS apps in the market exhibit this. Only the stock app.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Until last month I was paying 20 cents a text, which worked out to about $3.40 a month for me. less than the taxes on the line.
I have an unlimited plan now but that's because it was bundled with some other things I wanted. about half of my friends have per text charges, and if they cared about the charges they would switch plans.
Unlimited text being the standard is a recently phenomenon (last 3 or so years), and has not been something that has been around since the late 80s/early 90s as you suggest.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A lot of companies (i.e., Apple, Google, Oracle) use licensing that is "open source" in that the code can be used by anyone, however they are careful to always make sure that private modifications need not be published. Such companies avoid GNU like the plague, and only use it when forced (e.g., gcc). These companies then go further to make your stronger licensing ineffective by using DRM (e.g., Droid and TiVO) to make it even more unpleasant to hack their source base by depriving you of real control over the hardware. These guys use open source as a way to cheaply disseminate a platform they can advertise on, not as a movement or a service to the community.
With a license like that used in Google's user-land environment in Android, fixing patches only helps Verizon, Motorola, and Google, but the little guys won't see anything cool until Verizon and Google finds it unprofitable to maintain a separate fork any longer (which can be either short or long depending on the value). Even once said patches are published, good luck finding a cheap platform you can run it on that isn't locked down by your service provider. So there are huge disincentives for an unaffiliated hacker that go beyond mere access to the code. Rather than contributing to a movement, said hacker would just feel like a patsy that works for Google/Verizon for free.
--"You are your own God"--
Yes, the number is bigger. Dollars and pounds aren't the same thing.
wouldn't that make them appear cheaper when current rate is around 1.5 to 2 dollars to the pound?
US - $2.82
UK - $5.79
Netherlands - $6.48
France - $5.54
Ireland - $4.78
Spain - $4.55
Romania - $4.09
Brazil - $3.12 - the Americas are all this price
(numbers from Jan 2010 because that's all the data I had, numbers in US dollars per US gallon. current conversion factors also from Jan 2010)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire