Android - SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact | Hacker News Reader

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

code.google.com

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!!!!!!!"

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.

I think the drama of a million "WTF?"'s are just people of the internet being, well, people of the internet.

The TechCrunch post, discussions here, etc more accurately portray people being annoyed that this critical bug is getting ignored.

It goes back to the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory". Take a massive communication net, cheap to get on, and semi-anonymous, you end up with people acting their worst. Admittedly, some people's best isn't much to write home about (or, perhaps you shoud write to their mother...), but once you add username:'anonymous', you end up with behavior approaching to 4chan's /b/ board.

As anonymity on internet approaches 0, respect and sincerity approach in-person communication. And the opposite is true: when perfect anonymity is reached, baseness and vulgarity are the ruling factors.

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 ;)

I watched a presentation online by a large software company who used to to do this. They deprecated this as "prioritization by whoever shouts the loudest". Once a crash-bug-reporting system was in place it simply went away, as they had accurate enough data on how many people were affected, and could prioritize based on that. This won't help if it's not a crash bug, but the criticism of "prioritization by whoever shouts the loudest" is still valid.

"prioritization by whoever shouts the loudest"

...I'm actually not getting why this is a bad thing. The people shouting on your crash-bug-reporting system are unhappy enough to go out and yell at you rather than simply grumbling to themselves and continuing to use your program. Doesn't it make sense customer-service-wise to appease those folks who are going to yell about the bugs in your program and negatively influence peoples' opinions?

The mapping between degree of discontent and aggressiveness is different for different people.

Because of that, listening better to those shouting harder reinforces the notion that "the assholes get what they want".

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.

I've made vague, childish threats towards AT&T and had immediate beyond-the-call-of-duty service in return.

If user satisfaction is mapped on the X-axis of real numbers, doing beyond-the-call-of-duty service for a customer with negative user satisfaction is equivalent to multiplying by -1.

Not that it will take your complain any further, though.

Yes, but if a rogue SMS message messed up your relationship with someone, such rationality might be lost.

And there's always strength in numbers, if 2000 people complain about something (ignoring the language), it tends to get noticed more than if 1 person would report it and the rest thinks "hey, it's already reported, let's shut up and wait".

I'm rather sure that it does. Imagine it was coming in on telephone support - which bug is getting the most attention, the one with two reports or the one that's getting 200 calls an hour. The difference in visibility to management would have been dramatic anywhere I've worked.

Remember that September many years ago that never ended?

Yeah, well, it never ended.

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!"

Reminds me of usenet in the 90s.

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

"You cannot petition the lord with prayer."

Amen.

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

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.

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

Talk about worst case scenario!

I don't know about that. Considering the number of devices affected, chances are that some teenager has sexted their parents by now.

It wasn't anything bad, but it makes me very paranoid to text anything I wouldn't want public.

That is probably good advice no matter how you slice it. It's not like SMS is a secure method of communication.

It's not secure, but you have a reasonable expectation of privacy using text messages, at least as long as you trust the other person. Not "get away with crimes" privacy, but "I'm getting so-and-so this for their birthday" privacy.

Tend to disagree with this. Recently had the htc touch diamond. Then got a blackberry Storm 2 from the same carrier (telus). Bought the old phone back as a present for a friend that was going to go pay as you go (but you cant).

Then my friend tells me hes getting my text messages. Every one of them. So I get the phone back, call telus up and complain. The tech has me enter some number which opens up the config for the phone.

And low and behold I have my phone number sitting in the phone. Deleting the number stopped the text messages.

So lets think about this for a second. All I have to do to get your text messages is enter your 10 digit number into my old non active phone.

I would say security in text messaging is non existant.

FYI: Happened christmas of 2009 so it might be fixed but I doubt it.

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.

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.)

They talked about the iphone alarm bug on the news, it makes sense as well, the android bug is a fairly obscure and hard to trigger bug thats probably affected a few people, the iphone one affected everybody who uses the alarm

  iphone one affected everybody who uses the alarm

Not true. I cannot comment on the ratio though. Alarm worked fine for me on iPhone 4 and for my gf on iPhone 3G.

To make your statement true you should add modifiers like "on Jan 2nd", "those using recuring alarms" and possibly some others, I don't know the exact setup needed for this bug to manifest.

I actually had the iPhone alarm bug hit me on iOS 4.2 this past weekend. Almost messed up a surgical procedure I had scheduled. Not good.

I'm imagining that you were the surgeon. "Appendectomy? Yeah, there's an app for that."

Haha, no. In fact, it was my son's.

Nice play on words.

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.

To go even further: if someone got dumped on their wedding day because they texted their other girlfriend and the fiancée found out, the media's story will be that it's their own fault and you can't rage at the phone software.

If you miss a flight due to the phone, you can.

I can see all kinds of hilarious subplots coming out of this- Man texts vacation plans to mistress, text goes to wife, wife thinks its actually meant for her, man ends up having to buy same trip twice for both of them, etc...

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/crime/article/810236--toront...

Woman sued cellphone company for sending her cell bill to her husband, allowing him to discover her cheatin' ways. Was a pretty humorous story.

Yep - when a phone causes someone to waste £1500 on a flight they missed, it's tragedy.

When a phone causes someone's spouse to find out they they're cheatin' .. comedy gold.

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

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

Well with a bit of luck it won't be 2.3 only, so yeah but not as likely. And I'm guessing carriers are getting bitched at as well, so they're probably looking into getting this one fixed soon-ish on the phones they "manage".

Maybe the fallout will be a valuable lesson to carriers.

They've (in some cases) loaded phones up with crap, and in so doing made maintenance difficult. Any patch will have to go through their crapification process, and re-testing, leading to customer dissatisfaction.

Depending on how much dissatisfaction the bug causes, and the degree to which people clamor for Android phones anyway, carriers might decide to change their attitudes toward crapware.

There's no reason Google can't through a fixed Mms.apk on the Market and have it on old devices as well.

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

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"

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

I look forward to getting the fix on my Motorola Milestone this time next year.

This is one reason I ditched my HTC Magic on Rogers. I hear all this great stuff about new Android releases, but it's going to take months before any updates get to my phone, and by then Rogers will have boned things up somehow. With my iPhone I always have current (non-telco-modified) software.

Fwiw, Nexus One and Nexus S do the same for Android.

Yeah, this bug has convinced me that, when I get an Android phone, it has to be a Nexus.

Just got my Nexus S a few days ago, love it :).

Unbelievable...

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

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