Android App Sends Texts to Wrong Recipients

This is enough to make you paranoid: Google has acknowledged a bug in Android’s default text messaging app that sends texts to the wrong person.

Equally disturbing is that the problem’s been going on since March, and Google hasn’t fixed it yet. The bulk of the complaints started in July, but here’s a report of the problem from March 17 on Google’s Nexus One support forum:

“When I have three or four separate text message conversations going, the software gets confused and sends texts to the wrong person some times. You will think that you are typing a response to contact A and then suddenly the contact name at the top switches to contact B.”

In addition to this problem, some users report texts sent to random people who aren’t in their address book.

The burning question now is, how widespread is this bug? Informal polls show relatively small percentages of people are affected, but it’s still significant. ZDNet site Hardware 2.0 has been running an informal poll for about 12 hours thus far, with 10% of the respondents reporting trouble with SMS messages sent to the wrong person.

It seems if Google wants Android to continue being profitable, it needs to work well on all 172+ phones running it, especially when dealing with an operation as simple as sending text messages to their intended recipients. This problem, along with that sophisticated Android malware uncovered yesterday, is making Google look bad.

Even if the bug is only affecting a fraction of Android users, we think this potentially embarrassing problem is more serious than what Google has classified on its Android Google Code site as a “Priority Medium” bug.

How about it, readers? Let us know if you’ve experienced the problem in the comments.