Google has today confirmed a bug that left some text messages inadvertently being sent to the wrong recipient has been corrected on the search giant"s Android mobile operating system.
The bug was first reported last week, after a number of concerned Android users suggested Google wasn"t paying any attention to the issue because it only affected a limited number of users.
Today however, as spotted by TechCrunch, Google has acknowledged the problem, and says that they"ve been working hard to develop a fix for the issue. Because the problem occurred very rarely, Google engineers struggled to re-produce the problem, meaning it took longer than normal to find a resolution for the issues.
But now, the company says, they"ve found a fix for the bug and say that it should be deployed soon.
"Some users have reported that their SMS messages are being delivered to the wrong people," a company representative wrote. "It took us some time to reproduce this issue, as it appears that it"s only occurring very rarely. Even so, we"ve now managed to both reproduce it and develop a fix that we will deploy."
Google also acknowledged a second bug, which occurs when users open the Messages application and select a message too quickly. By selecting a message too early before the app has finished loading, users may find the incorrect SMS message opening, Google says. While Google is now preparing to deploy the fix, for now the best solution is to wait until the Messages app has finished loading.
It"s important to note that while Google believes it has solved both bugs in the Android operating system, they will be monitoring the situation closely in case they re-appear or are triggered by other circumstances. "While we don"t anticipate any persistent problems, we"ll continue to investigate in case we come up with additional ways to trigger these bugs," the company wrote.
Even though the fix has been announced, Google has not announce a date for when it will be released to the public.