Android users who thought they fat-fingered a text message to the wrong person may be able to lay the blame with Google developers.
The company acknowledged on Thursday long-running complaints that text messages occasionally would be sent to the wrong person due to a bug in the operating system. Google also said it found a second problem, but will deploy fixes for both soon."Some users have reported that their SMS messages are being delivered to the wrong people," wrote Android project member Nick Kralevich in a comment on a bug report for the issue. "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."
The bug report was filed in June as issue 9392 on Google's Android project pages, but comments on it suddenly proliferated earlier this week.
Some commenters on the forum felt that a just a few people were repeatedly complaining about the bug and accused them of "trolling," or slamming the forum with repetitive, obnoxious comments.
Google said it will also fix a second issue it discovered, in which in rare instances users see a different message in the Messaging application than the one they tried to open.
"We don't believe this issue is affecting many users, but we've developed a fix that we're preparing to deploy," Kralevich wrote. "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."
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