The THVB text bug (that is, the terrible, horrible, very bad bug) has been getting a lot of attention over the last few weeks. The issue re-emerged into prominence thanks to the release of the Nexus S phone, which failed to resolve the issue that was reported several months ago. Now, Google has given an official response.
For those unfamiliar with the glitch, here’s the short version: When you go to send a text message, it gets sent to the wrong person. End of story. According to a report on Mashable, Google says that there are two possible causes for the issue, and so it’s shown two possible lines of approach to resolve it.
The first issue is basically being pegged by Google as a user error, saying that it’s important to double-check who you’re sending the message to before you send it, and that users who think they’ve clicked on a different message thread may simply be too impatient. “We’ve found in testing this issue, it is more likely to occur if you tap on a message before the Messaging app is fully loaded,” said Google’s statement. “So we recommend waiting for all the elements to load before clicking.”
Part of the reason for the dismissal of responsibility may be that this is an impossible-to-fix error on the Android end of things. Given the diverse hardware and processing approaches to the Android OS, some issues will arise due to the different touch screens, load times, and so forth; Android may not have full control over the issue.
There are times, however, when this glitch happens without a good way to blame it on the user. “It took us some time to reproduce this issue, as it appears that it’s only occurring very rarely,” said the Google statement. “We’ve now managed to… develop a fix that we will deploy.”
