Ever missed an SMS on your Android? Here's why. (long-standing bug)

Related: I've had all of my SMS messages deleted 3 times on my HTC Incredible from this bug: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669</a>

tl;dr version: having the 'low space' warning on your Android phone results in the rejection of SMS messages. Even when there's actually e.g. &#62;10mb of storage available. The bug has been present since 2009 and appears not to have been fixed yet by Google.

This is one of the examples where I'm concerned about my own professionality because i can't grasp why Google would overlook such an error for such a long time.<p>Maybe there is a reason but my feeble mind can't bend around it?

I encountered this recently. Really exceptionally poor engineering for a communication device.<p>My solution: flash Cyanogen ROM, force all apps to install to the SD card. No more concerns about running out of internal memory.

They should probably fix this. Last week, the girl I've been dating, who I'm incidentally crazy about, admitted via text she was in love with me...<p>... I never replied because I didn't get the message.<p>She definitely felt awkward for a while when I saw her, wondering why I had chosen to just ignore that specific text.

Thanks for posting this! Now I finally know why some important texts from business associates never arrived.<p>I really can't believe this bug made it through to production. Why would carriers accept software with this kind of bug? I know I was blaming my carrier the whole time, and I bet others have been too.

Does the iPhone have a public bug database so we can search for issues?

What older Nokia phones used to do is refuse to accept the sms from the carrier, so it ended up getting queued/retried for a few days. I'm not sure why Android can't do the same.

The developer side of SMS messaging isn't pretty either. If you give sendTextMessage a bad phone number - NullPointerException, if you give it too long of a message - NullPointerException. <a href="http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/gsm/SmsManager.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/gsm...</a>

Could there be a common root to this issue, and that the phone stop syncing emails when the "low storage" warning comes on? No more incoming or outgoing emails, not even the manual "come on darn phone get my message" button does it. For me the warning kicks in around 14.85 MB (hit it so many times).

Oh so many moons ago I had a similar defect to fix on a phone I was working on. The defect was causing a type approval failure and we had to fix it before the phone was going to be type approved.<p>Type approval must be a walk over these days as long as you have a flash UI.

I find it interesting that if someones sends an SMS and it is rejected, the sender is not necessarily notified.<p>Most of the time I have SMS disabled on my phone (except for Google Voice). If someone on T-mobile (my carrier) sends me an SMS, they will get an error message, but people on other networks have no way of knowing that the SMS failed. Fortunately, most of my friends know that I prefer IM and the incorrigible texters have my GV number, but on occasion someone will try to SMS my actual phone number.

If you have an android phone and aren't using Google Voice, you are truly missing out.

That's the fun about Android, its a real mass market open OS and all the bugs are visible!!! Too bad its not for everyone to fix (or maybe its actually good?)

So... don't ignore the low space warning. Delete something.

Because of the high quality of iOS and it's large market reach, Android development had to be rushed a great deal. This caused most of the programming power to go towards developing base features (android 1.x - 2.x) or implementing tablet features when the iPad arrived, and almost no resources were left for developers support (the emulators are awfully slow, severe lack of animations framework, etc...) and for bug fixing. Once things start to settle down, bugs will start to get fixed.