Eric Mendes' Official Blog

To date, I have been the proud owner of three Android phones, (T-Mobile MyTouch 3g, MyTouch Slide, G2), and while I love the OS, there’s still plenty of bugs that I encounter here and there. One of the more frequent bugs lies within the text messaging apps, so when Engadget posted the potential devastating bugs within the text messaging API, it didn’t come as much of a surprise. Although, I believe the Engadget post represents hyperbole at its finest, the bugs within Android’s text messaging API is clearly a major issue.

While I experienced many of these bugs first hand, I never thought that it was a system wide bug, but rather within the specific text messaging app that I use – Handcent SMS. The largest issue that I have had is that the text messaging API resends texts after a hard restart. This issues stems from the API sending text messages, but it doesn’t realize that the message was sent. It just simply sits there in the “Undelivered Messages” section. Now when the phone is restarted, all these messages within the “Undelivered Messages” section gets pushed out by the API. This obviously causes confusion to both the Recipient and the Sender, since the sender does not realize this has occurred until after the fact. The biggest problem is that I know several Android users that this has happened to. I haven’t experienced this much on Froyo (2.2), but it was a major issue on my MyTouch 3g running Donut (1.6).

Furthermore, recently I was looking through the Handsent SMS settings, and found an option to “Prevent Resend”. Handsent describes this as, “Use Handcent’s special feature to prevent a resend issue that may happen on some phones after rebooting”. This option conveys that the issue has been known for a while, and still hasn’t been fixed. Shame on you Google.