You may have read last week about the SMS bug that has been plaguing some Android users. Or maybe you heard us talk about it on our InfoByte podcast this week. Maybe you’ve even experienced the SMS bug yourself, and found your texts going to random, unintended recipients.
We were on the fence about whether we believed it was actually a bug, or whether it was just user error. Apparently Google was able to reproduce the issue consistently enough that they were able to determine that it was, in fact, a legitimate problem, but only affecting a very small subset of users in very specific circumstances. They have been able to track it down, however, and have created a fix. They issued the following statement:
As it turns out, we believe there are two distinct situations being discussed on this issue chain. Fortunately, we have fixes for both of them.
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.
While we don’t anticipate any persistent problems, we’ll continue to investigate in case we come up with additional ways to trigger these bugs.
They have not yet made a statement as to how or when the fix will be deployed, but if we learn anything more we will let you know.
[via Google's Code Blog]