Code Benders

I picked up my Nexus One pretty soon after it was release earlier this year. I knew going in that there was a good chance that the device would have bugs. But I figured after several commercial distributions through other handset makers that the risk was pretty small. After all this is Android 2.0 we’re talking about.

Since picking up the device I’ve had several complaints about minor bugs. But I was jaw-dropping shocked last week when I discovered an email glitch that should cause any Android user concern if they use their device to send email.

So here’s the details. A week ago, I received an email from “Laura”. I replied to that email and then received another reply from her. When I scrolled down through the body of her reply I found the body of totally different email appended to this email. The appended text was placed inline just after my reply. Where this get really strange is that the appended text came from an email that I sent to another person (i.e., Laura was not a recipient of that email). In essence, Android’s email app is randomly pulling text from email and inserting in to another email.

I wanted to test the bug, so I forwarded an email to Matt and it happened again. Below is a screen shot from Matt’s iPhone showing the email that he received from me. The subject of the email is correct. But the body of the email is the body text from an email that I sent a week or two earlier. Creepy.

What I don’t know is whether this is a pervasive bug across all Android devices or whether this is a problem that is unique to my device. So if you’ve experienced something similar, add a comment here.

Interestingly, when I look at the email in the Sent folder sometimes my device will display the erroneous text and sometimes it displays the text I was trying to send.

Tags: Android, bugs, usability