Android operating system, despite its success, has been in the limelight in recent times for numerous bugs it has. Below are few lesser known but interesting bugs that were present in the Android operating system.
The Google Nexus One Touchscreen bug
The Google Nexus One arrived in the market in early 2010 and quickly wowed the users with its AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic light emitting diode) screen but after some time some users realised the touchscreen was not behaving the way it should have been.
One developer came out with a touchscreen application which visually showed the way the touchscreen was behaving. The problem was, when two points were touched and the users crossed the axis or the touched points were too close for comfort, the X and Y axes get flipped.
The basic problem was the quality of touch sensor used in the Google Nexus One. Whenever users moved their fingers on the screen, the touched points were registered by the device in different places other than the point of contact.
The next versions of the phones were launched with better touch sensors, but Google Nexus One still suffers from the same problem.
The Motorola Droid Camera bug
Motorola Droid was launched in 2009 with Android 2.0. At that time, the phone captured the attention of the users but some things were going wrong at the time of launch. The cameras of the Motorola Droid just didn’t focus. Some felt it was the plastic film over the camera lens which was responsible for the problem and that once the film was removed the problem would be fixed.
Others believed just a good cleaning of the glass would solve the problem while many other users were of the opinion it was a hardware problem.
None of them were right. Suddenly the cameras started working fine, and it turned out that the problem was due to a bug which was date dependent. The bug refreshed itself every 24.5 days, so some days the camera worked and some days it didn’t. Just when the camera was about to go back in to the poor focus mode, Google brought an update to fix the problem.
The rogue SMS bug
When the Froyo update arrived in Android, there were numerous improvements in the platform including the Messaging app.
However, it was later found that the messaging App used to send messages to wrong users even while the phones indicated that the message went to the right person.
However, very few users were affected by this bug. The fix for the problem arrived with the Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Those users who didn’t have the Google’s Nexus devices had to wait for quite some time to get their updates.