This is one of the examples where I'm concerned about my own professionality because i can't grasp why Google would overlook such an error for such a long time.
Maybe there is a reason but my feeble mind can't bend around it?
Well, uh, the organization Google and its employees keep buzzing along whether or not the problem gets fixed because although Android is a significant part of Google's long-term strategy, Android is not a significant part of Google's current revenue stream.
For all the hate Apple has been getting over the last year here, Apple's incentive structure is more closely aligned with the people who buy and use their hardware than most tech companies' incentives are aligned with their users, so if the organization can remain rational, it should serve their interests fairly well in the long term, which I guess is an argument for buying an iPhone provided you are a typical iPhone buyer, e.g., not someone used to the freedoms one gets by knowing how to program, communicating regularly with programmers and using open-source software.
Since they don't sell Android to consumers, that billion was made of licensing fees from Hardware makers + ads + Android market revenue. These will bring in revenue even if SMS doesn't work and SMS is not essential for them.
Did they support that with anything in terms of how they'd arrived at that number?
I'm guessing it's based on additional ad revenue driven by mobile searches but there are a lot of variables in there which would be open to debate and I'd be really interested in seeing their working.
So your point being that Googles Software aside from AdSense should be in general more defective because their incentive structure isn't as well aligned?
Today's news that Microsoft (who receive direct compensation for their phone software) is facing equally embarrassing bugs suggests that the licensed operating system model might be a better target of criticism than incentive structure.
It is very nearly so. I would estimate that over 99% of bugs that I can reproduce in a debugger are fixable (at least at the level of a work-around that takes the pain away) in a single day.
Depends on your idea of fixed, I suppose. You can band-aid it in five minutes: append a message to the Low Space Notification that SMS messages will be queued.
Really fixing it would require something more intelligent about the way Android handles space, such as reserving an amount of the internal memory for "critical" applications, or moving caches to SD card. The reason caches aren't on the SD card, I believe, is something philosophical at Google. They're holding onto the belief that people actually swap them with some regularity, rather than using them as user-expandable internal storage. Why Browser should merrily suck up an 80MB cache on my tiny internal memory is beyond me.
Maybe there is a reason but my feeble mind can't bend around it?