Android Plagued with SMS Bug, Messages Sent to Random Contacts

Google's mobile operating system, Android, is reportedly plagued with an issue that affects a handset's capability to send SMS messages to an intended contact, instead delivering it to a different recipient.

Apparently, this is a bug that already affected a great percent of Android users out there, but Google hasn't done anything as of yet to solve the problem.

According to some of the latest news around the Internet, the bug was reported for the first time about six months ago.

Following that initial report, a great number of users said that they experienced similar issues as well, which confirms the existence of this bug in the mobile operating system.

The first one to report on this issue was a developers, it seems, who described the problem as follows:

Send SMS message to RecipientA.
Message appears to be successfully sent to RecipientA.
RecipientX receives message.
‘View Message Details’ in RecipientA thread, shows ‘To’ field as being RecipientX’s MSISDN (phone number).

Since that initial post, other reports on similar issues with Android handsets also emerged, as users experienced it on various handsets out there.

However, it seems that, even if the issue was so wide spread, Google has been ignoring it for the past half a year. The company flagged the problem with medium priority until recently when, responding to the publicity the matter saw, changed the priority to critical.

Of course, it would still take a while before the issue is resolved, but it comes a good news that the Mountain View giant finally decided to take some action on this.

Since the Android platform is expected to become a leader on the mobile phone market within the next few years, it would have made sense for Google to take appropriate measures ever since the bug was initially reported.

A poll on ZDNet, which brought the issue to the spotlight, indicates that around 27 percent of Android users experienced the problem (but the percentage might increase).