Google raises 'misaddressed SMS' bug priority to critical

Obviously not an Android phone ...

Google has raised the priority of the SMS bug we wrote about earlier from medium to critical, likely because of all the recent publicity. The bug, in which an SMS is sent to a random contact instead of the currently selected one, was first reported in June.

The bug is reportedly not that easy to reproduce. An unscientific survey by ZDNet shows that 26 percent of respondents have seen the issue; a couple of days ago the results showed 10 percent.

At least one site has already called foul on the report, going so far as to assert "The “Android SMS Bug” Does Not Exist." The author compares the issue to a case of unintended acceleration in his past, when he stepped on the accelerator instead of the brakes. In other words, he attributes it to user error.

To be honest, we use, test, and develop software for Android devices, and over a variety of handsets (over 30 at the time of this writing), we have never seen this issue, once. One thing we have seen, while using Flyscreen (a 3rd party app we use as our lock screen) is that when trying to send an email from one of their Widgets, we often see the addressing autofill lag, so that it would be easy to misaddress an email (to be clear: the UI is custom UI to Flyscreen). Could this be the same issue with the SMS bug?

Most people say it happens randomly, and infrequently, if at all. Those are the bugs that are hardest to fix. It's obviously not as common as the iPhone 4 "death grip issue," as a search for a YouTube video for the issue brings up nothing obvious.

Our view is that there probably is a bug, but very hard to reproduce or requires other applications to be installed or settings to be set to create the "perfect storm" on the device.

One commenter at Android Guys says he can reproduce the issue on approximately 1 out of 5 texts. Another has asked if he can upload a video of the issue, to end the naysayers' rants. If that happens, this conjecture about "bug or not a bug" can end.