Database Users

The Sprint Hero Lost SMS Debacle

I was all set to finally take the plunge and sign a contract with Sprint for the new Hero - just waiting for my prepaid cellphone account to run out of money. Now more and more reports have started coming in about the Sprint Hero and its issues with losing SMS, and possible MMS too. Some sauces:
Engadget's questioning > and the scary responses: http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/26/htc-hero-having-intermittent-text-messaging-problems/
Sprint Community's ongoing thead: http://community.sprint.com/baw/thread/22913?tstart=0
SprintUser.com's ongoing thead (there are many): http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=195769
Slightly older but still the same problem from here from XDA: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=572134
A few observations (feel free to add your own):
-UK/GSM Hero users are experiencing this, though to a much lesser extent
-A common, but not completely sweeping assessment is that affected users are using task killer programs or did at one time, even before a hard reset
-Soft resets tend to help the problem, though only temporarily (for some)
-People are getting the same issues on brand new phones that they exchanged for old ones.
Any thoughts? Do you have any personal experiences with this? I'm hoping to hold out till HTC/Sprint releases a patch or some sort of announcement about this problem but in the meantime, what has your experience, as a CDMA/Sprint Hero user, been like in regards to losing/delayed SMS and MMS messages?

From my experiance running Hero on the G1 lost text messages were due to the messeges app failing due to many things running and causing it to crash.
I can't speak for the sprint Hero, though I have not experienced any lost text messages I am aware of.
Maybe its a network issue?

I actually experienced it once. From what it appears, I downloaded a task manager and selected to kill all running apps. After I rebooted my phone though I have yet to experience any text message loses. Originally I was blaming it on a 3rd party messaging service, however now I really think it was as a result of killing the messaging app. This happened about a week and a half ago and so far *knocks on wood* have not experienced any other issues. Aside from that, I still love my hero. I honestly think that it is the best phone I have ever owned.

My biggest issue with SMS messages is that I've had up to a 3-4 minute delay between the timestamp on the message and when i get the notification. But AFAIK, I haven't lost any messages.
I think its a great phone so far. If Android keeps picking up as it appears to be, I think it can trump apple and iphone.

I have not lost any texts. I tested with texts to and from different carriers and area codes. I have not run any task killers. For what it's worth, I have not had any of the battery problems that people have run into either.

i had lost all of my SMS messages on my Sprint Hero after i installed Handcent SMS and used it for a couple days ( which so happened to be exactly a week after i bought the phone the messages were gone)

your sms's are still there, but they are in your messenger app, handcent doesn't access stuff that's already there, just the new stuff comming in. I don't belive it's possible to import the sms's that are already there, or at least there's not a known procedure on how to do so.
you can access them if you pull up your original messenger app, just no way to import/export. Sorry, probably not the answer you were looking for, but it is the correct one.

I had this problem when I first got my Hero, no text messages were being received, third party SMS app or not. My Hero said 'with Google' on the back. I exchanged it for one that just says 'htc', haven't had the problem since.

im worried
ive had the phone for 2 weeks.three days later i got the dreaded calls from friends and girlfriend that i havent been answering back to text. ive installed handcent sms and smstomailbox. from then on the problem has stopped.although i have sent myself some text and im yet to receive them no one has told me they cannot contact me. i just moved to sprint because i recently got a job as an assistant. my boss contacts me strictly through text. (you can imagine the magnitude of this issue) after all the forums ive read, i dont know what to do regarding this. my 30 days is almost up. i cant imagine a patch is not already on the works, but ive read this has been a known problem for some time. with Htc pumping out phones by the dozen and 1.6. / 2.0 updates taking the spotlight, i wonder if i should return my phone. the phone is real nice and i dont want a flimsy pre. seems too much stress for a device you pay good money for.i have the sprint hero with the "with google" in the back. seems like a bad time to get a phone with sprint since theres no news on wether this phone will be upgradeable or patched and the other phones are going to get upgraded soon. (HD2)

!!!
on another thread someone posted that the problem had been acknowledged . the post pointed to a flaw in the sms app that did not send a "memory full" notification back to the sms database server. so it seems theres a limit to the sms app capacity and it kinda locks down or something along those lines. lol (sorry ill post the link when i find it again) in other news 2.0 is coming to the hero. so i guess ill deal with the issues till then.

I purchased a Hero on launch day [early run device, without 'with Google' branding, only 'HTC' on the back cover] and quickly encountered the intermittent text message delivery debacle.
Bottom line, there were extended periods of time in which text messages being sent to me were simply not appearing on my phone. [Side note, this includes individuals both on and off the Sprint Network.] Turning the phone off and on usually alleviated the non-delivery / appearance problem but any messages sent during that time were gone. There was no flood of messages post restart.
I should note that on two occasions I did notice that I had received a text in the top notification bar but when I opened the Messaging App, the text was no where to be found.
It appears that the messages may indeed have been delievered... but the app is 'eating' them, so to speak. This *could* explain why on Sprint's end, everything looks fine on the network... or so I was told, which I believe.
My temp solution, as advised by forum / discussion posts by other Hero users was to install an alt Messaging App [I used Handcent SMS] and use this rather than the stock Messaging app. Additionally, I added 'SMS To Mail Lite' which forwarded a copy of my incoming texts to an email address. I experienced no intermittent outages / delivery failures / abductions at all. Both Handcent and the email inbox matched. While this 'worked' I was unable to replicate the bug but since I was using Handcent this might have been why.
Later, after spending some time on the phone w/Sprint Advanced Tech Support, they determined it was not a network issue and was due to the phone itself [as their system showed all my messages being delivered]. They set up a trouble ticket and I was able to swap my Hero for a new one at my local store. Caveat, I was still under the 30 day trial which made things much easier when I got to the store.
I was told by Advanced Tech Support that HTC has recognized this intermittent text delivery issue and they are working on a solution. I only mention 'Advanced' b/c the first individual I spoke with from regular Text Messaging Support had zero knowledge of this issue and was quick to deny any problems whatsoever. No one at the store knew anything about it either, but I wasn't expecting it. So if you speak with anyone at Sprint, expect that they might not know yet and be nice. You might even get a replacement phone.
Currently, I'm still using Handcent and really like it. Tried ChompSMS but just prefer the other. They're on par w/one another so be sure to check them both out if you prefer to go this route. Also, I used the 'My Backup Pro' app to restore my new phone to the original configuration. Certainly worth the $5.
Hope this helps.

Grrrr! All SMS deleted...

I had all of my SMS messages for over a year saved on the phone. A couple thousand of them at least. Until today.
I was receiving a couple of SMS from a friend of mine and lamenting that the built in messaging software doesn't provide a nice way to see a message at a glance without having to unlock the phone and bring down the notification bar, etc. With my G1 I had been using SMS popup for most of this past year and I liked it, but thought I would just try seeing how it was living with the basic messaging system on the N1 since I got it.
So, just as I'm thinking that maybe I should reinstall SMS popup since the built-in support had me swiping and swiping too much to just check the messages I get a FC on the "MMS" system app. Through the FC screen I could see all the thread of messages and was worried that if I FC'd it then I would lose the latest message. Well, that's not exactly the danger there.
I OK'd the FC message and the messaging app closed, and then I brought it back up and I have 1 single message saved - just that last message, nothing else. All couple thousand messages my phone had been dutifully saving for me for over a year - from the earliest RC releases of Android 1.0 when I got my G1 the night before it was released - all the way through cupcake and donut, all the way through my experiments with using Cyanogen through the month of December - through thick and thin - all of them are gone now from one FC on a seemingly innocuous message.
And, even more oddly - the single message I'm left with doesn't show the sender's contact picture.
Grrrrr... Should have backed up more often I guess. At least I have a backup from a couple of weeks ago when I switched from my G1 to my N1.
So, beware - backup your SMS/MMS early and often if you want to save your history...

Try using handcent app it has pop up built in also.

Get SMS Backup and Restore from the Market... I back up my SMS messages every few weeks.

uansari1 said:
Get SMS Backup and Restore from the Market... I back up my SMS messages every few weeks.
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I use MyBackupPro - any reason to switch?
(It has scheduled backup capabilities, but I've never made use of them...)

flarbear said:
I use MyBackupPro - any reason to switch?
(It has scheduled backup capabilities, but I've never made use of them...)
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Nope... no reason to switch if you've already paid for MBP. Probably want to start using the scheduled backup now though, eh?

Just out of curiousity, why would you want to keep all your SMS from the past year?

pjcforpres said:
Just out of curiousity, why would you want to keep all your SMS from the past year?
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Thank you. I was wondering the same exact thing. If they were that important, why not have people send messages to your gmail so that it's saved to the cloud. . . Or, setup a GoogleVoice account and have all SMS go there, then forward to your phone, so that they're still on the cloud.

pjcforpres said:
Just out of curiousity, why would you want to keep all your SMS from the past year?
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The phone keeps up with it quite fine. In the first 1.0 releases it would take a long time to open the Messages app if you had more than a few dozen messages, but they fixed that in one of the earlier releases and so there was no real performance penalty to keeping all messages. By the time I reached enough messages for it to possibly trigger that performance problem they had released the fix. And since then it's been smooth sailing with upwards of 4000 messages.
My question back is - why delete them? I'm a pack rat. I save things, especially when there is no reason to get rid of them. Now, keeping physical things around the home - that can get to be a problem and so there is a cost to keeping everything, but email and SMS - keeping them is essentially "free" (I've never even noticed the storage hit on any of my Blackberry or Android phones) and you never know when you are going to want to go back and say "Actually, you texted me XXX and YYY back in March" just to needle someone... ;-)
And yes, I have a couple of gigabytes worth of email saved on my laptop from the past decade or so too. (Though I do delete most messages at work - anything of the nature of "this weekly meeting will be held in such and such a room" or "Can someone fix the build?" or an automated status message from a server get deleted, but anything with any technical content gets saved...and has occasionally proven useful...)

Mi|enko said:
If they were that important, why not have people send messages to your gmail so that it's saved to the cloud. . .
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They aren't "that important". I'm just a data packrat by nature. Storage is cheap nowadays. ;-)
Mi|enko said:
Or, setup a GoogleVoice account and have all SMS go there, then forward to your phone, so that they're still on the cloud.
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I haven't delved into Google Voice at this point, but that does sound like an interesting solution...

I can't imagine why you would want to keep a years worth of sms!
I purge all mine fairly regularly anyway, just to clean up.

I use G-backup to backup my SMS/MMS and call logs to GMail

Fair enough. I am a huge car nut, and have a bit of a pack rat nature as well. So, I have a garage stall filled with spare parts for Volvo 240's, and then random bits from other cars that might be useable on a Volvo 240, or a future planned project car. As well, I have managed to gather a small pile, yes small, of tools.
I just never though SMS would be affected by a pack rat mentality. For me, it is one of the few things I do keep neat and clean. Hell, I am that guy that saves 1 of every different beer bottle he has ever had, and so forth. I got it from my mom, she had 3 giant plastic buckets filled with receipts from who knows how long(at least 15 years!)

I had this happen to me as well and I was pretty pissed. I'm a packrat by nature as well, so this didn't sit well with me. And it seemed to happen in a similar way with me. I was using chompsms and got a new text, read it, went back to my conversation list, and it was the only one in there, and even then that text was the only text in that conversation.
But I guess it was time to start over anyways, but with the kind of stuff I'm involved with, text records can be very important sometimes.

They're just texts, no one cares about them.

midnite23 said:
but with the kind of stuff I'm involved with, text records can be very important sometimes.
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Sms backup saves all your texts to your gmail with an sms tag. It backs them up when theyre received so youll never lose them.

muncheese said:
They're just texts, no one cares about them.
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Clearly some people do.

midnite23 said:
Clearly some people do.
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That's my point.
Anything really important should never reside in a 160 character medium.

Clearly, you've never heard of twitter....

muncheese said:
That's my point.
Anything really important should never reside in a 160 character medium.
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Hello!? Those late night texts are never something that would hold up in court or anything, but they are worth their weight in gold on the "social blackmail" black market...

Messaging app is completely terrible

I purchased an evo for both me and my wife. A friend of mine did the same as well. It seemed like a good deal at the time and the phone seems to be good quality overall...
However, when messaging back and forth quickly, messages disappear from the thread and cannot be seen in any way. All that I receive is a notification. This has happened for all of us. Messages are also often received in the wrong order.
Would the situation be any better if I was using plain android instead of the buggy sense UI? It looks like the froyo rom is making good progress.. I'm going to try it, but if it's still as buggy as it is stock, Sprint will be getting 4 EVOs returned.

Try another messaging app like handcent or chomp. You have choices.

No problems here, and I'm on my 2nd Android phone. Both have worked great with no problems such as yours.

Seems like more of a rant then a request for help. that being said, my family has 5 Evo's between us and we have had not one complaint with the SMS. possibly sprint service in the area? i know when i'm in smaller towns the sms seems to lag, almost like its stuck in queue somewhere before being sent to me.
good luck mate!

Use Handcent. Problem solved. The stock app is slow and sucks.

If you hate it, go back to the iPhone where you obviously came from?
Now to try to find a question to answer within all that complaining....... hmmm... oh yes, I'm having issues with the SMS coming in odd orders occasionally. I did not ever experience this with my Hero.
So what I can derive from that is that this particular release of Sense, which is NOT Android, has a bug. You need to differentiate between the OS and the VERY deep reaching Sense UI that HTC puts on top.
I'd tell you to wait for the ROM development to pick up, but something tells me you're not a tinkerer. The iPhone is a fantastic phone.. you just can't tinker as much as you can with Android. So with Android you'll have choices but you'll have bugs. It's just something I come to expect.
It's like running Linux. Sure it's trendy to hate Microsoft, but holy hell there are a lot of problems with Linux apps in design, UI, and in general stability (Note, I didn't say Linux has problems.. I said apps. Because it's the crap on top of the underlying system I have complaints with). I still love it, I just have to approach it with an attitude that it's not going to be as polished as OS X, and it's not going to be as stable either.
Welcome to Open Source and the stuff people put out with it.

After hearing everyone praise handcent I decided to give it a try myself and wow is it better. Choice is very nice
Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk

Edited to remove ranting, I'll give handcent a shot. Hopefully it doesn't lose random messages =(.

I've gotten some messages out of order, but that's about it.
If I try Handcent and somehow don't like it, is it easy to revert back to the original built-in messaging app?

pekosROB said:
I've gotten some messages out of order, but that's about it.
If I try Handcent and somehow don't like it, is it easy to revert back to the original built-in messaging app?
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Nevermind I realize it's an independent app. I just replaced my Messaging icon with the Handcent one on the homescreen.

BTW, anyone using handcent have a problem sending MMS?

pekosROB said:
Nevermind I realize it's an independent app. I just replaced my Messaging icon with the Handcent one on the homescreen.
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Just make sure you disable notifications in the stock app so you don't get double notifications. That's annoying.
Also, I haven't had any problems with MMS while using Handcent.

afazel said:
Just make sure you disable notifications in the stock app so you don't get double notifications. That's annoying.
Also, I haven't had any problems with MMS while using Handcent.
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Thanks, I totally noticed that too. But it looks like if I disable notifications in the notification bar then it doesn't let me make sure it plays a sound.
Does handcent control that on its own so it doesn't matter if the sound is disabled on the stock messaging app?

pekosROB said:
Thanks, I totally noticed that too. But it looks like if I disable notifications in the notification bar then it doesn't let me make sure it plays a sound.
Does handcent control that on its own so it doesn't matter if the sound is disabled on the stock messaging app?
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Handcent has its own notification settings.

Jye75 said:
Handcent has its own notification settings.
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Thanks, I turned off the messaging app notification and it still notified me when I got a text.

donatom3 said:
BTW, anyone using handcent have a problem sending MMS?
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Yea I have that problem alot I usually use built in messaging for MMS and handcent for all other SMS. I never have a problem receiving MMS with handcent just sending.

I prefer chomp, and have had no issues. well maybe one, or two texts out of order. Like if the sender typed a "two page" text and sent, then sent a short text the short one might come in before the second half of the "two page" text.

roybotnik said:
I purchased an evo for both me and my wife. A friend of mine did the same as well. It seemed like a good deal at the time and the phone seems to be good quality overall...
However, when messaging back and forth quickly, messages disappear from the thread and cannot be seen in any way. All that I receive is a notification. This has happened for all of us. Messages are also often received in the wrong order.
Would the situation be any better if I was using plain android instead of the buggy sense UI? It looks like the froyo rom is making good progress.. I'm going to try it, but if it's still as buggy as it is stock, Sprint will be getting 4 EVOs returned.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
that doesn't happen with my sms app but it does happen with my google mail from time to time.

prestonr83 said:
Yea I have that problem alot I usually use built in messaging for MMS and handcent for all other SMS. I never have a problem receiving MMS with handcent just sending.
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I ran some tests and I can send over 3g it's only when wifi is enabled. So I did some research and found out sprint only sends MMS over their connections. The default messaging app will bypass wifi and use 3g to send mms. Handcent had patched this for the Hero.

I'd like to put in a plug for ChompSMS. I hadn't used it before, but people were saying that it automatically resizes your pictures when sending MMS. Maybe this isn't a problem on the Evo, but it was on the Hero. I will occasionally get a text out of order if someone sends me a long one that is broken up into more than 2 messages. But, I really like it's interface better than Handcent, which I have also used. As far as I know, I have never had a text go missing when using Chomp.
Android is all about choice. It's really nice to have all these choices and these are FREE (as in beer).

[Q] Text messaging unacceptably slow?

I just got a myTouch 4g, and I've had issues with the speed of accessing text messages. It takes a good 5+ seconds to access a thread to read or respond to texts.
I should probably note that I switched from a Vibrant and backed up my texts with SMS Backup & Restore App, I have about 9k texts with threads of 400+ messages.
Compared to a BB Bold, the time it takes to access messages for me is a deal breaker. I'm hoping that there is something wrong with my phone as I love everything else about it, but I'm strongly considering switching to a Bold within my 2 week return period...
Has anyone else had issues with the text messaging speed??

Never had any issue like that. But I also don't have that many texts. Back up your texts again and clear the phone and try to see how responsive it is when you don't have any saved on the phone.
Also try something other than the stock app to see if that helps
Failing all of that, go to a t-mobile store and try out another mt4g and see if the problem exists.
Hope any of those helps. Sorry to hear about the troubles.
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App

Amegis said:
I just got a myTouch 4g, and I've had issues with the speed of accessing text messages. It takes a good 5+ seconds to access a thread to read or respond to texts.
I should probably note that I switched from a Vibrant and backed up my texts with SMS Backup & Restore App, I have about 9k texts with threads of 400+ messages.
Compared to a BB Bold, the time it takes to access messages for me is a deal breaker. I'm hoping that there is something wrong with my phone as I love everything else about it, but I'm strongly considering switching to a Bold within my 2 week return period...
Has anyone else had issues with the text messaging speed??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're using the stock messaging app correct? If you are, use Handcent. Handcent archives them better, so each thread loads faster. I too have 8,000+ texts.

Deleting them helped somewhat but once a thread has a few hundred messages it starts to slow down.
I'm using the stock app, so I'll give Handcent a try to see if that works. I hope so as I'm starting to like everything else about the device more and more.

Any time I bust more than 500 ish in a thread, or about 2k total it becomes sluggish... I just delete them... its whatever, you can save the important SMS somewhere else. Like gmail
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App

I think you just have waay too many text.

Handcent helped sooo much, the native app is like molasses compared to it.
It still struggles with a large amount of texts but not as much. To solve that I found the "delete old messages" app, which that clears your texts but keeps the last X weeks.
Thanks for all the help! I'm sticking with android now, as the texting is fast enough.

Stock sms app has auto delete old built in as well
[via XDA app]

Permanent resolution for Group Texting? Tried it all..

So I bounce between my HD2 (Group Textings on OS works nearly perfect, just a little delay.) and my G2. I recently went back to my G2 due to options for apps. Ive tried Handcent & Go SMS..but they fall so short and have bugs/doesnt work.
Most my friends have iPhones & I still resist. Any permanent 'fixes' or options ive overlooked?

what is your problem with group texting? i cant think of a single rom that the default messaging app didnt support it. even dating back to the ol g1 days. maybe we have different ideas on how group texting should work...

demkantor said:
what is your problem with group texting? i cant think of a single rom that the default messaging app didnt support it. even dating back to the ol g1 days. maybe we have different ideas on how group texting should work...
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If someone includes me in a group text that hes say 5 different iphone #'s in it..If I respond it only gets sent to the original sender, and if I recieve 4 respones from 4 different reciepients itll be 4 individual texts "threads" besides the original one.
Am I missing something?

That's how every group message I've ever used worked. Unless some apps have a way to change that.
Sent from my EVO 3D, using TapaTalk 2.

I too have had this problem. I have settled on handcent. It is not perfect but it gets the job done. When I was doing my research some people were having luck with the verizon messaging app......
HammDroid - True group messaging performs more like a group chat. When the message comes through you can see sender and the other recipients of the message. When you reply it gets sent to the group. I believe it has become more popular due to iphone usage...