Android - SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact

[JacobAldridge]

On a somewhat related note, is this how people really communicate on the internets? Thinking the 954 prior requests will be ignored unless I ask Google to "fix it please" and reach the critical mass of 955 people asking them! Better add "quickly". Or better yet, just throw in a WTF, and multiple !!!.

I can only hope this one is ironic - "WTF!!?? I just want to say WTF?!!!?!? I will never buy an android phone again. This is the worst thing I can imagine in my life. Worse than the end of the world. Worse than the Doomsday. Just want to say WTF again!!!!!!!"

[ry0ohki]

Until TechCrunch (or someone?) posted an article pointing this flaw out last week the bug was not marked as critical. I think the drama is the way a lot of people feel about seeing what seems like an obviously critical bug as something google is ignoring.

I'm on several Android bugs that seem pretty bad, and they are either marked as not being fixed or being low priority, and sure enough i'll get a "WTF" update from a new person discovering them once or twice a week.

[viraptor]

Actually... it does make a difference in some situations. Just strip the comments and count it as "people affected". Sure - coogle code issues already implement "star"-ing issues, but it's just another indication of "number of less techy people affected".

Also, many people know that, "I want to escalate", shouting, saying you'll sue, writing directly to a person higher up, etc. often can reorder the priority of your complaint... so they do that. Of course it doesn't work that well on the internet. If I got a penny for each issue I needed to handle out of order, because the customer could shout really loud... I'd have a pound maybe ;)

[wladimir]

Although people go over the top in rudeness, which doesn't help anyone, it's a fact that a lot of bug reports by customers to big companies get ignored. So the screaming is not entirely unwarranted.

[SkyMarshal]

Remember that September many years ago that never ended?

Yeah, well, it never ended.

[Jun8]

Right, this makes for some very interesting and funny reading. One of my favorites is:

"you FXXK guys! i hate the android,i love symbian!"

[eli]

Reminds me of usenet in the 90s.

[sigzero]

That poster probably got hit by the bug sending his love text to the wrong person.

[lwhi]

"You cannot petition the lord with prayer."

Amen.

[eddieplan9]

I guess it's Google's way of saying legacy native non-webapp app is bad and hard to fix.

[starnix17]

I'm sure they'll be fast to fix this, but how fast will phone manufactures be to push this out?

This is definitely a real bug, a few weeks ago a text intended for my girlfriend went to my mom. After you send a text and it goes through the phone changes the name to some random other contact and there's nothing you can do about it.

[ot]

> a few weeks ago a text intended for my girlfriend went to my mom

Talk about worst case scenario!

[davidedicillo]

Interesting how everyone was talking about the iPhone alarm bug, but nobody (in the mainstream world) is talking about Android sending out your SMS to random people.

[gloob]

It's possible that I just don't hang out with the cool people, but HN is the only place I've heard any discussion of either of them, and (before this link) I had seen exactly one link about each issue on the front page.

(Edit: Were they talking about it on the TV news? That's about the one obvious place where a lot of people would have heard about it that I would have completely missed. That would make sense, actually.)

[ergo98]

I did see the SMS bug mentioned on several mainstream news stories.

However to get mentioned in mainstream news there needs to be a compelling story: Someone claiming that they missed a flight, missed their wedding, etc -- something to make it a real human interest story. The Android bug would have been front and center if there were a confirmed "example" story where someone got fired or dumped on their wedding day or something because of a misdirected SMS.

[jakevoytko]

Well, not for long - it looks like they have a fix: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9392#c1460

[rimantas]

Isn't the situation such that this fix will take a long time to reach some of the users? Sometimes as long as "never"?

[bumbledraven]

How does one view the code change associated with this fix?

[lwhi]

Perhaps we should add a standard disclaimer to the bottom of all SMSs we send:

"If you are not the intended recipient of this message .. blah blah blah"

[nkassis]

Hehe, makes me happier I don't use sms and just use email. If that happened to email I'd shoot the phone. Seriously that's an odd bug, anyone looked at the patch? How those the bug happen?

[Andrenid]

This has me all paranoid now. I've never noticed it on my phone (and I send a LOT of texts for work as well as personally), but now i've got this itch to go back through every message stream for the last few months and check.

[elvirs]

Comment 1013 by xiaweihua94, Jan 02 (5 days ago) oh come on that's horrible, the message which is supposed to my girlfriend went to my boss. please fix it as soon as you guys can

[mcantor]

Omigosh. I wonder if that's why my boss keeps looking at me funny lately. This is no good at all.

[rebelde]

This is such a bad bug that I will be surprised if it doesn't get picked up by major news organizations.

The fact that this bug exists is bad enough, but realizing that your phone might never get the bug fix is even worse.

[AndrewDucker]

The question is - if they have a fix, how will they get it out to people who aren't upgrading to 2.4 (or whatever the next version is)?

Are people with HTC Wildfires and the like going to be stuck with this bug permanently?

[chrisbroadfoot]

Dot versions are pushed, too (I'm on 2.3.1 right now) - so I suppose it will be in 2.3.2 and presumably whatever stable version of Froyo.

I guess we'll see.

[pwpwp]

Unbelievable...

[yanw]

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9392#c1460