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Android Text Messages Intermittently Going Astray

Posted by Soulskill on from the digital-foot-in-mouth dept.

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."

14 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. hey what is it with Hungary these days by Mister+Pedant · · Score: 5, Funny

    !

    sent from my android

  2. Google support by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Eventually, Google may have to realize that some of their products actually require customer support.

    1. Re:Google support by Totenglocke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Bugger the exorbitant cost, my next phone will be an iPhone 4. I'm sure it'll have foibles of its own, but they're unlikely to be in the basic usage.

      As long as you don't count making a phone call or the alarm working "basic usage". =D

      --
      "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
  3. Re:Medium is appropriate... by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. This is fucking hilarious. by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Definitely bug. One or several remains to be seen. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. uh.... maybe not by locust · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:uh.... maybe not by Tailhook · · Score: 5, Informative

      The actual code is here.

      Reading the various compare() implementations definitely leaves room for doubt about correctness. The compareStrictly() code is a lovely illustration of the ambiguity that exists in the world of phone numbers. The comparison implementation mentioned above is found in compareLoosely() and is characterized in comments as "similar() not equals()", meaning collisions are possible. Which of compairStrictly/Loosely is actually use is subject to configuration; the caller can't know which is used without examining configuration resources.

      Haven't yet seen evidence that this is the cause of the problem folks are having; does the SMS code rely on this? The comments claim the compareLoosely() method is "identical enough for caller ID purposes." One could imagine that when the user hits 'reply' on a message the code might hunt through the phone book using compareLoosely and stop on the first "match", which may be incorrect due to a collision. There seems to be some correlation between reports of this phenomenon and the 'threaded' 'conversation' stuff in Android, which could mean people are relying on 'reply' and getting wrong results.

      Who knows. Bugs will happen and phones aren't trivial. The real problem in my mind is that this one has been on the books for a looong time now (six months, approximately) and it's not getting the attention it clearly deserves.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  7. Re:It's open source by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Informative

    Software should be free.
    Texts should be free.
    Free, free, free (or almost free).

    "When phones are on, they are ALWAYS connected to the cell phone tower. The phones and cell phone towers exchange little packets worth of information back and forth so when ever a call comes it, they can find you straight away. Can anyone guess how big the packets are? If you guess 160 characters, you are right." In other words they are charging for a service that should be free, because the phone and tower are *already sending* Texts to one another. It costs nothing for the company to append that Text to the outgoing packet.

    "When you think of it on a kilobyte level it costs us $1.09 per text message Kilobyte. The markup for costs is 7300%." So using an typical 2000 messages/month, that's just 320,000 characters or 0.00032 gigabytes. It shouldn't cost 25 dollars (what VirginMobile charges me). Continued here: http://www.spoiledtechie.com/post/The-Actual-Cost-of-Texting2c-Short-Codes-and-a-731425-Mark-up.aspx and here: http://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+texting

    To summarize: Phones are "texting" towers constantly as part of the cellular standard.
    The appending of a personal message costs nothing extra for the company.
    The rates are outrageously high for the minuscule data passed.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  8. It's been fixed by philj · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. This bug is bad by mysidia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  10. Re:It's open source by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The value of a text message is what ever the customer will pay for it. It has nothing at all to do with cost.

    Android comes with Google Talk. It is Free (included in your data plan) and is not arbitrarily limited to 160 characters.

    ON most cell networks, SMS messages utilize a signaling path that is used to notify phones of call arrival. (Specifically using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol).

    That path has a finite capacity. When that path is busy, calls go direct to voice mail without so much as a ring on your handset.

    This type of traffic needs to be moved to the data plan instead of the network signaling path. Google Talk (which is simply Jabber) is the perfect tool for this and works across all platforms (cell phones, computers, tablets, etc).

    --
    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  11. Another critical bug no one blogged about by bobsszz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  12. Re:Talk about bugspam... by rmcd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're right about starring rather than spamming, but the attention had the intended effect. The priority is now marked critical.