You’ll remember the epic story of the SMS Bug going around for months now, gaining large attention over the past few days – see both [UPDATE] Android SMS Bug Now Has “Critical” Priority and [Rally with Us] to Fix The Android SMS Bug posts for full details. Seems now the bug’s been parred down to a separate issue with receiving emails-to-SMS from Bank of America, SMS alerts sent by Linkedin, and SMS alerts sent by T-Mobile. Each of these appear to corrupt Android’s SQLite database, making things go wild. All of this is detailed in a separate Issue in the Google Code reporting site, #1233.

Is this the same bug? Might as well try n’ fix it with the fix they’re suggesting:

1. Perform a hard reset (wiping out all of your data.)
2. Block T-Mobile, Linkedin, and Bank of America.
3. Figure out a different way to communicate with those groups probably.

If that doesn’t work, might as well keep yelling and screaming!

4 COMMENTS

  1. Can you walk through the steps someone needs to take to block a given sender? I’m guessing we need to collect specific sender information before wiping out the phone? A coworker of mine has a TMobile phone that does this and I’d like to give her a clear set of instructions that might solve her problem.

  2. Blocking these groups could be as simple as getting off of their mailing lists. If I was you, I’d have your co-worker go in to her local T-Mobile store, have them help her keep her purchased apps and contact list, reset the phone, add the contacts and apps back to the phone, and make sure she’s not getting mails from T-Mobile, Linkedin, and Bank of America by opening a mail from each of them, scrolling down to the bottom of the email, and looking for the “unsubscribe” link that’s almost certainly there on each. If she uses Gmail, she could use this simple tutorial to block them by name: http://www.butterscotch.com/tutorial/How-To-Block-A-Sender-In-Gmail and if none of this ends up having an effect, keep an eye on Android Community (here) for further solutions as we receive them.

  3. While both bugs are related and display similar problem behaviors, they are caused by different things going on in the code.

    The problem is much more pronounced on 2.1 than on 2.2 due to code changes to the 2.2 code base that tried to fix this problem (and only partially did so).

    On the 2.1 platform, the best way to see the problem is to start sending a few messages to different people AND have them send you a bunch of messages. You want to have a lot of messages flying around. The trick is that when you are sending your messages, don’t do it using the “reply” button, rather you should use the “compose” button which will bring up the editor window where you can put in their name or phone number. I think you want to have a name in there when something appears on your notification bar, but I’m not 100% sure as it’s been a while since I was troubleshooting this issue.

    When you receive as message, you might need to look at it using only the notification bar pull down. Then go back to your message and don’t edit anything. Just press send.

    It make take a while and I may not be recalling all of the steps 100%, but this should get you down the path of reproducing the problem, if that’s what you’re interested in doing.

    Now, on to prevention. The best advice is simply that if you are in the middle of editing/typing a message and something happens that takes focus away from what you’re doing (e.g., something happens on the notification bar or a new window pops up), then stop what you’re doing, quit the messaging app, relaunch the messaging app and then start your message over again.

    I’m glad Google is finally working on this. I hope they are able to get a patch out to *ALL* of the Android based phones quickly.

    Hope this helps.

  4. my epad is showing an application open home(process android.process.acore) has stoppe d unexpectedly.please try again. somebody please help me to shoot the trouble, I am newer to android platform

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