5 ms·

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

57 points by chrisbroadfoot 16y ago

JacobAldridge 16y ago
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!!!!!!!"
- eli 16y ago
  Reminds me of usenet in the 90s.
- wladimir 16y ago
  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.
  - DeusExMachina 16y ago
    Not that it will take your complain any further, though.
    - wladimir 16y ago
      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".
    - trotsky 16y ago
      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.
  - harry 16y ago
    I've made vague, childish threats towards AT&T and had immediate beyond-the-call-of-duty service in return. related: http://twitter.com/damonish/status/14889207186 http://twitter.com/damonish/status/14889207186
    - relix 16y ago
      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.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
- viraptor 16y ago
  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 ;)
  - newt 16y ago
    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.
    - jokermatt999 16y ago
      "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?
      - Someone 16y ago
        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".
- lwhi 16y ago
  "You cannot petition the lord with prayer." Amen.
- Jun8 16y ago
  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!"
- sigzero 16y ago
  That poster probably got hit by the bug sending his love text to the wrong person.
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  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.
  - twymer 16y ago
    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.
    - TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
      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.
- eddieplan9 16y ago
  I guess it's Google's way of saying legacy native non-webapp app is bad and hard to fix.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Remember that September many years ago that never ended? Yeah, well, it never ended.
yanw 16y ago
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9392#c1460 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9392#c1460
davidedicillo 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.)
  - daleharvey 16y ago
    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
    - rimantas 16y ago
      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.
      - larrik 16y ago
        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.
        metageek 16y ago
pwpwp 16y ago
Unbelievable...
jakevoytko 16y ago
Well, not for long - it looks like they have a fix: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9392#c1460 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9392#c1460
- rimantas 16y ago
  Isn't the situation such that this fix will take a long time to reach some of the users? Sometimes as long as "never"?
  - masklinn 16y ago
    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".
    - CWuestefeld 16y ago
      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.
  - drivebyacct2 16y ago
    There's no reason Google can't through a fixed Mms.apk on the Market and have it on old devices as well.
- bumbledraven 16y ago
  How does one view the code change associated with this fix?
elvirs 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Omigosh. I wonder if that's why my boss keeps looking at me funny lately. This is no good at all.
AndrewDucker 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
  - ZoFreX 16y ago
    I look forward to getting the fix on my Motorola Milestone this time next year.
    - rikthevik 16y ago
      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.
      - SkyMarshal 16y ago
        Fwiw, Nexus One and Nexus S do the same for Android.
        metageek 16y ago
        Yeah, this bug has convinced me that, when I get an Android phone, it has to be a Nexus.
        SkyMarshal 16y ago
        Just got my Nexus S a few days ago, love it :).
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
starnix17 16y ago
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 16y ago
  > a few weeks ago a text intended for my girlfriend went to my mom Talk about worst case scenario!
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    I don't know about that. Considering the number of devices affected, chances are that some teenager has sexted their parents by now.
  - starnix17 16y ago
    It wasn't anything bad, but it makes me very paranoid to text anything I wouldn't want public.
    - SomeCallMeTim 16y ago
      That is probably good advice no matter how you slice it. It's not like SMS is a secure method of communication.
      - xpaulbettsx 16y ago
        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.
        Cyndre 16y ago
        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.
Andrenid 16y ago
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.
lwhi 16y ago
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"
rebelde 16y ago
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.
nkassis 16y ago
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?
davidj 16y ago
Because people will buy a phone with faulty SMS abilities, Google has no financial incentive to fix the bug. If people stop buying the phone and vote with their wallets, Google might fix it. Until then, you can probably assume there are dozens of other bugs that they don't care to fix, maybe they could be serious security bugs - who knows.

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!!!!!!!"

eli 16y ago
Reminds me of usenet in the 90s.
wladimir 16y ago
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.
- DeusExMachina 16y ago
  Not that it will take your complain any further, though.
  - wladimir 16y ago
    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".
  - trotsky 16y ago
    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.
- harry 16y ago
  I've made vague, childish threats towards AT&T and had immediate beyond-the-call-of-duty service in return. related: http://twitter.com/damonish/status/14889207186 http://twitter.com/damonish/status/14889207186
  - relix 16y ago
    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.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
viraptor 16y ago
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 ;)
- newt 16y ago
  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.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    "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?
    - Someone 16y ago
      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".
lwhi 16y ago
"You cannot petition the lord with prayer." Amen.
Jun8 16y ago
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!"
sigzero 16y ago
That poster probably got hit by the bug sending his love text to the wrong person.
ry0ohki 16y ago
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.
- twymer 16y ago
  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.
  - TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
    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.
eddieplan9 16y ago
I guess it's Google's way of saying legacy native non-webapp app is bad and hard to fix.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
Remember that September many years ago that never ended? Yeah, well, it never ended.

yanw 16y ago

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

davidedicillo 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.)
- daleharvey 16y ago
  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
  - rimantas 16y ago
    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.
    - larrik 16y ago
      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.
      - metageek 16y ago

pwpwp 16y ago

Unbelievable...

jakevoytko 16y ago

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

rimantas 16y ago
Isn't the situation such that this fix will take a long time to reach some of the users? Sometimes as long as "never"?
- masklinn 16y ago
  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".
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    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.
- drivebyacct2 16y ago
  There's no reason Google can't through a fixed Mms.apk on the Market and have it on old devices as well.
bumbledraven 16y ago
How does one view the code change associated with this fix?

elvirs 16y ago

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 16y ago
Omigosh. I wonder if that's why my boss keeps looking at me funny lately. This is no good at all.

AndrewDucker 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.
- ZoFreX 16y ago
  I look forward to getting the fix on my Motorola Milestone this time next year.
  - rikthevik 16y ago
    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.
    - SkyMarshal 16y ago
      Fwiw, Nexus One and Nexus S do the same for Android.
      - metageek 16y ago
        Yeah, this bug has convinced me that, when I get an Android phone, it has to be a Nexus.
        SkyMarshal 16y ago
        Just got my Nexus S a few days ago, love it :).

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

starnix17 16y ago

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 16y ago
> a few weeks ago a text intended for my girlfriend went to my mom Talk about worst case scenario!
- jhamburger 16y ago
  I don't know about that. Considering the number of devices affected, chances are that some teenager has sexted their parents by now.
- starnix17 16y ago
  It wasn't anything bad, but it makes me very paranoid to text anything I wouldn't want public.
  - SomeCallMeTim 16y ago
    That is probably good advice no matter how you slice it. It's not like SMS is a secure method of communication.
    - xpaulbettsx 16y ago
      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.
      - Cyndre 16y ago
        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.

Andrenid 16y ago

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.

lwhi 16y ago

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"

rebelde 16y ago

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.

nkassis 16y ago

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?

davidj 16y ago

Because people will buy a phone with faulty SMS abilities, Google has no financial incentive to fix the bug. If people stop buying the phone and vote with their wallets, Google might fix it. Until then, you can probably assume there are dozens of other bugs that they don't care to fix, maybe they could be serious security bugs - who knows.