Android Text Messages Intermittently Going Astray 325
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."
Google support (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually, Google may have to realize that some of their products actually require customer support.
Re:Medium is appropriate... (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.
This is fucking hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bug or inaccurate tapping? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's open source (Score:2, Insightful)
Who are you talking to, exactly? Is it just theodp, or everybody on Slashdot, or do you want my grandma to roll out her own new Android patch?
Does releasing the source code absolve the vendor of any responsibility to support their product?
Re:Medium is appropriate... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is fucking hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a high priority bug that has no excuse for not being fixed within days of it being reported.
I thought the "fix it yourself" folks were being sarcastic. I can't imagine that anyone would really try to claim that this isn't a serious bug that Google needs to fix. The fact that there are free alternatives like Handcent does not in any way absolve Google from fixing the default text messaging client.
Re:Google support (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
Re:It's open source (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).
Re:Talk about bugspam... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right about starring rather than spamming, but the attention had the intended effect. The priority is now marked critical.
Re:It happened to me. (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't excuse anything with regards to this issue in the Android OS, but if you, as an engineer, use SMS to iron out critical details on project, you have even bigger issues.
SMS was never advertised as a reliable communication medium, nor was it ever recognized as such. Using it for official communications, especially communications that should probably be traceable and leave an history is really not that bright. Emails are so easy to use on mobiles now, they offer a much better alternative.
If you are using SMS for anything other than "I'll be 10 minutes late to the meeting, please start without me", you are doing something seriously wrong.
Re:Talk about bugspam... (Score:1, Insightful)
The fuck? How else are you supposed to get a gauge on how important the bug is to your user base? People like you who are overly hostile towards users giving honest feedback are exactly what's holding open source back. Why don't you run off and "find something productive to do" rather than whining in a slashdot comment...