7 ms·

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

110 points by sssparkkk 16y ago

sssparkkk 16y ago
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.
- andrewbadera 16y ago
  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 ...
  - sssparkkk 16y ago
    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.
  - joelhaasnoot 16y ago
    This app is great if you're rooted. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.aac.cachemate.demo&feature=search_result 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.
  - Aissen 16y ago
    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-low-on-disk-space/2163 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/is-your-droid-incredible-lo...
- jrockway 16y ago
  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.
  - DrJokepu 16y ago
    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.
    - bobds 16y ago
      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.
      - runjake 16y ago
        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.
        jrockway 16y ago
        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.)
Roritharr 16y ago
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?
- hollerith 16y ago
  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.
  - metageek 16y ago
    In July of last year Google announced that Android had made them over a billion dollars in Q2.
    - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
      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.
    - blub 16y ago
      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.
frankdenbow 16y ago
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 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669
- sssparkkk 16y ago
  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.
- nl 16y ago
  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 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669#c415
- jeffreyg 16y ago
  Same here with my Incredible. Every 3-4 months, out of nowhere all my SMS messages are gone.
TillE 16y ago
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.
- gulbrandr 16y ago
  > 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.
  - TillE 16y ago
    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.
andrewfurman 16y ago
If you have an android phone and aren't using Google Voice, you are truly missing out.
- mfontani 16y ago
  Not everybody is in the USA :(
  - HelloBeautiful 16y ago
    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.
    - MHordecki 16y ago
      For starters, GV provides USA phone numbers, so all your friends would suddenly face substantial roaming charges.
- mcantor 16y ago
  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.
imrehg 16y ago
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).
zrgiu 16y ago
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.
- lukasb 16y ago
  "Once things start to settle down" Ah right, when Apple stops innovating, then?
ghc 16y ago
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.
temptemptemp13 16y ago
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/SmsManager.html http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/gsm...
tsuyoshi 16y ago
So... don't ignore the low space warning. Delete something.
- sssparkkk 16y ago
  No. Don't silently reject SMS messages when I have megabytes of storage available. Let me know I'm missing something.
ig1 16y ago
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.
djcdjc 16y ago
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.
jsight 16y ago
Does the iPhone have a public bug database so we can search for issues?
- olivercameron 16y ago
  Yes, it's called Open Radar: http://openradar.appspot.com http://openradar.appspot.com.
shimi 16y ago
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?)
bherms 16y ago
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.
- sssparkkk 16y ago
  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.
  - bherms 16y ago
    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)
  - dreeves 16y ago
    My co-hacker and I have a solution for IM conversations that we love: http://yootles.com/nims http://yootles.com/nims
- brianmwang 16y ago
  The amazing part of this anecdote is that she didn't declare this to you in person.
  - bherms 16y ago
    Alcohol was slightly involved, otherwise I imagine it would've been a bit different.
RK 16y ago
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.

110 points by sssparkkk 16y ago

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.

andrewbadera 16y ago
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 ...
- sssparkkk 16y ago
  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.
- joelhaasnoot 16y ago
  This app is great if you're rooted. https://market.android.com/details?id=com.aac.cachemate.demo&feature=search_result 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.
- Aissen 16y ago
  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-low-on-disk-space/2163 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/is-your-droid-incredible-lo...
jrockway 16y ago
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.
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  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.
  - bobds 16y ago
    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.
    - runjake 16y ago
      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.
      - jrockway 16y ago
        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.)

Roritharr 16y ago

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?

hollerith 16y ago
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.
- metageek 16y ago
  In July of last year Google announced that Android had made them over a billion dollars in Q2.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    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.
  - blub 16y ago
    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.

frankdenbow 16y ago

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 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669

sssparkkk 16y ago
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.
nl 16y ago
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 http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669#c415
jeffreyg 16y ago
Same here with my Incredible. Every 3-4 months, out of nowhere all my SMS messages are gone.

TillE 16y ago

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.

gulbrandr 16y ago
> 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.
- TillE 16y ago
  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.

andrewfurman 16y ago

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

mfontani 16y ago
Not everybody is in the USA :(
- HelloBeautiful 16y ago
  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.
  - MHordecki 16y ago
    For starters, GV provides USA phone numbers, so all your friends would suddenly face substantial roaming charges.
mcantor 16y ago
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.

imrehg 16y ago

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).

zrgiu 16y ago

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.

lukasb 16y ago
"Once things start to settle down" Ah right, when Apple stops innovating, then?

ghc 16y ago

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.

temptemptemp13 16y ago

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/SmsManager.html http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/gsm...

tsuyoshi 16y ago

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

sssparkkk 16y ago
No. Don't silently reject SMS messages when I have megabytes of storage available. Let me know I'm missing something.

ig1 16y ago

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.

djcdjc 16y ago

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.

jsight 16y ago

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

olivercameron 16y ago
Yes, it's called Open Radar: http://openradar.appspot.com http://openradar.appspot.com.

shimi 16y ago

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?)

bherms 16y ago

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.

sssparkkk 16y ago
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.
- bherms 16y ago
  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)
- dreeves 16y ago
  My co-hacker and I have a solution for IM conversations that we love: http://yootles.com/nims http://yootles.com/nims
brianmwang 16y ago
The amazing part of this anecdote is that she didn't declare this to you in person.
- bherms 16y ago
  Alcohol was slightly involved, otherwise I imagine it would've been a bit different.

RK 16y ago

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.