Ever missed an SMS on your Android? Here's why. (long-standing bug) | Hacker News Reader

Ever missed an SMS on your Android? Here's why. (long-standing bug)

code.google.com

110 pointssssparkkk65 comments

Related: I've had all of my SMS messages deleted 3 times on my HTC Incredible from this bug: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669

Wow, that's really bad as well. However, that particular bug appears to be rather difficult to reproduce, so I can understand why they haven't been able to address it yet.

That's a bad bug.

But I have to say that comment [1] might be going a bit far comparing the loss of some SMSes to the burning of the library of Alexandrina

[1] http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669#c415

Same here with my Incredible. Every 3-4 months, out of nowhere all my SMS messages are gone.

tl;dr version: having the 'low space' warning on your Android phone results in the rejection of SMS messages. Even when there's actually e.g. >10mb of storage available. The bug has been present since 2009 and appears not to have been fixed yet by Google.

I get the low space message with what seems like a fairly limited number of apps installed, caches cleared and as much as possible pushed to SD ... what is the actual capacity there? HTC Incredible in my case ...

Similar situation here, I recently freed up several mb's as well; but nonetheless started to receive the low space notification again a few days later (not having installed anything in the meantime).

The fact that this subsequently results in missed SMS messages is inexcusable IMO.

This app is great if you're rooted. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.aac.cachemate.demo... Otherwise, I find AppBrain great to be able to easily see space usage and move stuff to SD. I have a Samsung Galaxy Spica (not S, a european phone), and the limit is at about 15 MB when I get warnings. That's hundreds of SMSes... Then again, the Gmail cache eats MBs like a dog eats dogfood: easily 3MB.

AFAIK, HTC Incredible has a bug that makes this warning appear even if you have 800MB+ of free space. The joy of forks… http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/is-your-droid-incredible-lo...

appears not to have been fixed yet by Google

Or by anyone whining on the bug tracker who say this issue is ruining their life.

I really don't think that the "if you're not happy about a bug, fix it or shut up" mentality in open source projects is very helpful. Obviously solving issues like this is considerably more difficult and time consuming than complaining about them and many people complaining about them don't have the time and/or skills to solve them. However, they are real, existing issues that bother users and not complaining about them will not make them magically go away. This, over time, can lead to the alienation of the users and can seriously hurt the project.

I think that part of jrockway's point is that at least some of the people complaining on a bug tracker, have the skills to help.

It seemed more like he was trolling to me.

Everyone who complained on this bug paid for Android as a commercial product.

I may be a master Linux debugger, but I'm not about to debug every little appliance/automobile issue I have because there's a bug in it's embedded Linux subsystem.

I never thought I'd see the day when people would use OSS as a defense for a commercial product not getting fixed. Especially when I suspect that the component involved isn't actually open source.

You most definitely didn't buy Android from Google. The OEM bought Android from Google. Then your carrier bought the phone with Android from that OEM. Then you bought the phone from the carrier.

By the time it gets to this point; what's in AOSP and what's on your handset are only very distantly related.

On the other hand, if you are running AOSP on your phone, then you did that all by yourself after cloning it from their public git repository.

Remember, Google is not to blame for bugs in Android. Your carrier is. (And most of the time, they're the ones who break it. This case is probably something that can be solved by Google, but apparently the OEMs and carriers are not prioritizing it above adding NASCAR apps and changing all the colors. And that is who is getting your money.)

In my opinion this mentality is more helpful than spamming bug tracker with "YOU SUCK FOR NOT FIXING THIS!!111eleven!" which seems especially common with Android's bugs. I even assume that such comments actually hamper fixing of respective bugs.

Just treat it as "+1 I'm affected too". Could be written better, but it at least shows the number of people affected / annoyed by specific bug.

The problem is that nobody from google seems to read these bug reports.

No, the problem is google doesn't make enough money off android to devote more resources to the project. Droid has more technical issues (supporting more platforms) than iPhone but generates less profit. That formula inevitably leads to less development resources and a worse product.

Right, and Symbian is the best mobile platform because Nokia has invested the most 'development resources' in it.

Also if you add all the open source developers of things like the Linux kernel, Android has way more ppl working ot it compared to iOS.

Just the term 'developer resources' shows you know very little about software development.

So, you have to be able to fix bugs in Android if you want to use it? I somehow doubt that Google wants to sell Android phones only to the 20 million developers in the world who could (theoretically) fix bugs.

Well, they don't sell Android phones. The carriers do. Google benefits from you doing Google searches on the phones, which is unaffected by this.

Basically, Google has no incentive to fix this bug, but the people complaining about it do. So they should do the fixing if they actually want it fixed.

(Technically, the OEM or carriers should fix this bug, and they are probably working on it Behind The Scenes.)

I know that Google doesn’t sell phones and you know very well that I know that. Don’t patronize me.

Your opinion seems to truly be that you can expect no reliable help from Google when you encounter a bug in Android which is pretty mind-blowing to me. I don’t think that Google is quiet so deaf.

This makes sense to me. The carriers are supposed to be giving you support. It's like the Windows that comes bundled with your laptop; you can't call Microsoft for support, you have to call the OEM. Same for Android phones.

What about people whining about the people whining? You could fix the bug and shut everyone up!

Android development is done only by Google. When they're ready, they release a new version along with its source code.

Have you tried sending them a patch? They accept them.

There are also a number of third-party Android distributions (CyanogenMod, etc.) that accept patches and do nightly releases.

If there is a bug in Android, and it is "ruining your life", it's your fault for not fixing it.

It is a commercial product that someone has paid for. Google (or one of the handset manufacturers) should fix it. Just because it is open source, does not mean users have the responsibility to fix bugs.

This is one of the examples where I'm concerned about my own professionality because i can't grasp why Google would overlook such an error for such a long time.

Maybe there is a reason but my feeble mind can't bend around it?

Well, uh, the organization Google and its employees keep buzzing along whether or not the problem gets fixed because although Android is a significant part of Google's long-term strategy, Android is not a significant part of Google's current revenue stream.

For all the hate Apple has been getting over the last year here, Apple's incentive structure is more closely aligned with the people who buy and use their hardware than most tech companies' incentives are aligned with their users, so if the organization can remain rational, it should serve their interests fairly well in the long term, which I guess is an argument for buying an iPhone provided you are a typical iPhone buyer, e.g., not someone used to the freedoms one gets by knowing how to program, communicating regularly with programmers and using open-source software.

In July of last year Google announced that Android had made them over a billion dollars in Q2.

Did they support that with anything in terms of how they'd arrived at that number?

I'm guessing it's based on additional ad revenue driven by mobile searches but there are a lot of variables in there which would be open to debate and I'd be really interested in seeing their working.

Since they don't sell Android to consumers, that billion was made of licensing fees from Hardware makers + ads + Android market revenue. These will bring in revenue even if SMS doesn't work and SMS is not essential for them.

I'm not sure I see your point. While this bug alone will not be enough to hurt Android adoption, enough quality issues stacked up certainly will.

The buffer that they are given because of manufacturer QA and patching will only go so far.

So your point being that Googles Software aside from AdSense should be in general more defective because their incentive structure isn't as well aligned?

Today's news that Microsoft (who receive direct compensation for their phone software) is facing equally embarrassing bugs suggests that the licensed operating system model might be a better target of criticism than incentive structure.

Easily reproducible doesn't equal easily fixed.

It is very nearly so. I would estimate that over 99% of bugs that I can reproduce in a debugger are fixable (at least at the level of a work-around that takes the pain away) in a single day.

Depends on your idea of fixed, I suppose. You can band-aid it in five minutes: append a message to the Low Space Notification that SMS messages will be queued.

Really fixing it would require something more intelligent about the way Android handles space, such as reserving an amount of the internal memory for "critical" applications, or moving caches to SD card. The reason caches aren't on the SD card, I believe, is something philosophical at Google. They're holding onto the belief that people actually swap them with some regularity, rather than using them as user-expandable internal storage. Why Browser should merrily suck up an 80MB cache on my tiny internal memory is beyond me.

I encountered this recently. Really exceptionally poor engineering for a communication device.

My solution: flash Cyanogen ROM, force all apps to install to the SD card. No more concerns about running out of internal memory.

> Really exceptionally poor engineering for a communication device.

I disagree. You can not judge their entire engineering based on this particular bug. From my little experience developing an Android application, I have to say that they have done a pretty good job in the engineering/API design part.

I didn't mean the whole of Android was a pile of crap. I've developed Android apps as well, and yes, the API is pretty decent and in some cases very clever and innovative.

That doesn't make neglecting a longstanding, rather critical bug any less embarrassing. I mean, it's bad enough that it exists in the first place. But we've now gone 4-5 major versions without a fix.

They should probably fix this. Last week, the girl I've been dating, who I'm incidentally crazy about, admitted via text she was in love with me...

... I never replied because I didn't get the message.

She definitely felt awkward for a while when I saw her, wondering why I had chosen to just ignore that specific text.

I'm often amazed by how quickly things get messed up if a single message is dropped from a conversation. People really expect communication channels like these to never fail.

I'm starting to understand that things will always potentially fail... But when you're paying over $100/month for service on a device that you paid $200+ for, I think you have the right to expect it to work.

They need to fix this or come up with a new method that pings back to a server when successfully received to signal success. (or something along these lines)

My co-hacker and I have a solution for IM conversations that we love: http://yootles.com/nims

The amazing part of this anecdote is that she didn't declare this to you in person.

Alcohol was slightly involved, otherwise I imagine it would've been a bit different.

Does the iPhone have a public bug database so we can search for issues?

Yes, it's called Open Radar: http://openradar.appspot.com.

Thanks for posting this! Now I finally know why some important texts from business associates never arrived.

I really can't believe this bug made it through to production. Why would carriers accept software with this kind of bug? I know I was blaming my carrier the whole time, and I bet others have been too.

What older Nokia phones used to do is refuse to accept the sms from the carrier, so it ended up getting queued/retried for a few days. I'm not sure why Android can't do the same.

The developer side of SMS messaging isn't pretty either. If you give sendTextMessage a bad phone number - NullPointerException, if you give it too long of a message - NullPointerException. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/gsm...

Could there be a common root to this issue, and that the phone stop syncing emails when the "low storage" warning comes on? No more incoming or outgoing emails, not even the manual "come on darn phone get my message" button does it. For me the warning kicks in around 14.85 MB (hit it so many times).

Oh so many moons ago I had a similar defect to fix on a phone I was working on. The defect was causing a type approval failure and we had to fix it before the phone was going to be type approved.

Type approval must be a walk over these days as long as you have a flash UI.

I find it interesting that if someones sends an SMS and it is rejected, the sender is not necessarily notified.

Most of the time I have SMS disabled on my phone (except for Google Voice). If someone on T-mobile (my carrier) sends me an SMS, they will get an error message, but people on other networks have no way of knowing that the SMS failed. Fortunately, most of my friends know that I prefer IM and the incorrigible texters have my GV number, but on occasion someone will try to SMS my actual phone number.

If you have an android phone and aren't using Google Voice, you are truly missing out.

Not everybody is in the USA :(

What is stopping you from telling some Goolge form you are from USA? Many companies offer free US numbers over VOIP, that you can use during registration.

For starters, GV provides USA phone numbers, so all your friends would suddenly face substantial roaming charges.

Google Voice is an unusable mess. I've literally never missed a vanilla SMS, but Google Voice regularly delivers them hours or even days late.

That's the fun about Android, its a real mass market open OS and all the bugs are visible!!! Too bad its not for everyone to fix (or maybe its actually good?)

So... don't ignore the low space warning. Delete something.

No. Don't silently reject SMS messages when I have megabytes of storage available. Let me know I'm missing something.

Because of the high quality of iOS and it's large market reach, Android development had to be rushed a great deal. This caused most of the programming power to go towards developing base features (android 1.x - 2.x) or implementing tablet features when the iPad arrived, and almost no resources were left for developers support (the emulators are awfully slow, severe lack of animations framework, etc...) and for bug fixing. Once things start to settle down, bugs will start to get fixed.

"Once things start to settle down"

Ah right, when Apple stops innovating, then?

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