Google Confirms Android Bug Where SMS Messages Are Sent to the Wrong People

These two bugs have been in the news this week:

When some users tap to open a message in the Messaging application, they’re seeing a different message appear instead. We don’t believe this issue is affecting many users, but we’ve developed a fix that we’re preparing to deploy. Of course, double-checking the displayed message before hitting “Send” will prevent any messages from being sent to the wrong recipients. We’ve found in testing this issue, it is more likely to occur if you tap on a message before the Messaging app is fully loaded, so we recommend waiting for all the elements to load before clicking on the message you want to display.

Separately, some users have reported that their SMS messages are being delivered to the wrong people. It took us some time to reproduce this issue, as it appears that it’s only occurring very rarely. Even so, we’ve now managed to both reproduce it and develop a fix that we will deploy.

This is where the slow deployment of Android OS updates to non-Nexus phones matters.

And if you enjoy the taste of claim chowder, you might like Chuck Falzone’s piece on the AndroidGuys blog from a few days ago: “The ‘Android SMS Bug’ Does Not Exist”. (Hint: “I don’t see the bug” doesn’t mean “the bug does not exist”.)

(Insert your own “Well, at least the Android alarm clock app worked on January 2” neener-neener here, if you wish.)

★ Thursday, 6 January 2011