SMS Delivery Reports lie!

S

synfulpinion

New member
So I texted a friend over the weekend. The delivery report icon in the Messaging app went, as it always does, from a red L (clock) to a green i. Long clicking on the message and selecting "View report" shows it as Received.

I asked him if he got my message just now online, and he tells me this story about how his battery died on Friday, and he'd left his phone at his sisters so it's been off all weekend.

So I decided to test this.

Indeed, I can repeat this with one of my spare phones. The delivery report icon goes from a red L to a green i as soon as the message is sent, and viewing the delivery report via a long press says it's received, even if the recipient phone is switched off.

Has anyone else experienced this? If you send a text message to a phone that is switched off, does your delivery report claim it's delivered when it obviously isn't?

I've tried the usual power off/on, turning Delivery reports off/on, etc. Still does it.

On T-Mobile UK.
 
When it says Received, it means that the receiving party's carrier's SMSC has accepted the message. It does not confirm delivery of the message from that SMSC to the end-user.
 
Well that sucks as that information isn't a lot of use in most cases. A Delivery Report should indicate when it's delivered to the target phone (and possibly as well as the SMSC, if anyone cares).

I'm inclined to disagree to some extent too, as every other phone I've ever owned works differently to this. On all my previous phones, the delivery report has three statuses that I've seen - Pending, Delivered, and Failed.

Pending is displayed (I imagine) when the SMSC receives the SMS message, and it stays in Pending until the recipient phone actually receives the text message itself. This seems to be what the G1 calls "Received" based on what you said above.

Delivered is when the recipient phone receives the text message. This is what we all want to actually know. Other phones can do this, and the common meaning of "Delivered" is delivered to its final destination. To use an analogy, I'd get annoyed if I was tracking a package online from Amazon and it said "Delivered" when what they really meant is that it had been received by the courier. It's common sense.

Failed is displayed if it, well, failed for some reason, such as it timed out waiting for delivery after three days or it's an invalid number.

Is there no way of getting the actual delivered-to-the-phone notification on the G1 then like how delivery reports work on most other phones? I seem to remember you could manually enter *MD# at the start of the text message and it would text you back when it was received... but that's going back 15 years or so.
 
I'll back up what has already been said. Basically the delivery report is if the carrier accepted the message. It then gets queued up in a giant message queue until the user receives it (think a JMS queue on steroids). I've never had a phone that did it any different.

Part of the reason for doing it that way is then there's less data needed to complete a message. Once it hits the other carriers persistent queue, there's really no point to relay back because it's suppose to be a guaranteed delivery.

So, if your text fails, it's due to a bad or rejected connection.
 
Well, I don't know what to say. My own experience and other sources say different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS says that delivery reports "can provide positive confirmation that the message has reached the intended recipient".

Testing this right now as I type this with my old phone (Nokia N95) here's what happens:

1) Send a text message to my G1 (which is switched off).

2) View Delivery Report, it says "Pending".

3) Wait 10 minutes to ensure there's no network delays causing odd results.

4) Switch G1 on, it notifies me of the new text message, and about 4 seconds later my Nokia N95 beeps and displays "Message delivered" on the main screen.

5) Viewing the Delivery Report and it now says "Delivered at [time]".

6) Repeated the above steps but with G1 switched on... The message was received by G1 in around 3 seconds. Around 3 seconds later Nokia N95 displays "Message delivered" and delivery report updates immediately to "Delivered" (no intermediate pending stage).

Want more proof? Well, the first user manual for a Nokia I found on Google can be view here:

http://nds1.nokia.com/phones/files/guides/Nokia_7610_UG_en.pdf

Check out page 58 where it says: Receive report (delivery report) - When this network service is set to Yes, the status of the sent message (Pending, Failed, Delivered) is shown in the Reports (Network Service).

In the above text there are three statuses as I said before. In your example, would would be the difference between Pending and Delivered?

All I can think of is that they perhaps work differently on different carriers. I have experience here in the UK with all of the 4 big carriers, and a whole load of different makes and models of phones, and every single one of them apart from the very early ones supported the above types of delivery notifications. The G1 is the first phone I've seen in around 15 years that doesn't work in this way.
 
I have the same problem.

I used to have a sony k800 (also on t mobile) and it would display reports correctly. with my g1 it says its been delivered whether its has been or not.

Hope they fix this soon.
 
I have just found out that the same has happened with my delivery reports. I have been texting abroad for a week (?1.40 a time) and thought that my messages were being received, turns out none of them have. If I had known the first text was pending I wouldnt have sent any more! Absolutely raging and ?10 lighter for it!
Is there a fix for this yet?
 
If you want it fixed more quickly, you need to bring it to Google's attention. I linked a bug above that mentions this. If you go there and "star" the bug (click on the star icon somewhere on the page). This is the way Google tracks how many people have interest in a given bug.
 
A fix for this bug has already been checked into the Android OS. We may see it in an upcoming release. There's nothing more we can do but hope that it's included, and wait for it to be included. At least Google have fixed this.

See comment 6: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2305
 
Hey there, has been a long time nobody answered in this thread, but anything new about this problem? I just purchased a Samsung Galaxy S with Android 2.1 and - believe it or not - it's still not working correctly but in some other way:

- If I send a message and that message in fact gets delivered, it says "delivered" (not 100% sure about the right words since I'm from Germany and use german as language on my phone).
- When the opposite's phone is turned off or has no connection, it doesn't give me any report. That's fine for me, if it would bring me a report after being eventually delivered. But it doesn't do anything. So I'll never know when the message is transfered, or even IF.

Furthermore, using the "Handcent SMS"-App, I got the same problem as you guys - it always says delivered, even if it's not.

Any solution yet?
 
It's a bug in Android, and has been known about for a loooong time.

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2305
 
Yeah, my Nokia N80 would let me know when a message was really received. It's just another annoying but important Android lameness, right up there with lousy pop/imap app and bluetooth file transfer. These problems should have never been problems to begin with. With texting it's a real drag as often times it's important for carrying on a conversation. I sent three messages to a recipient in Boston (business, not chit-chat). He got first and third message immediately. The second, twenty four hours later. With my old N80 I would have known.
 


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