Google Android Bug Shows Benefit of Open Source and Free Flow of Info

Imagine typing out a text message, tapping in “reboot”, and wondering why your phone actually rebooted. That’s a quirk caused by a hilarious—but serious—bug affecting G1’s running on the RC29 firmware revision. I totally understand why Ed Burnette called this the “Worst. Bug. Ever.” over at zdnet.com. A bug that ultimately gives a casual user complete access to your smartphone if you happen to leave it unattended is a very bad thing indeed.

At the same time however, Ed’s discussion of the issue also shows the advantages of open source, and why being able to share info quickly over the internet is a great thing:

Because Android is open source, the problem was quickly tracked down by users to a couple lines in the system file init.rc. My guess is that this was accidentally left in during device debugging. Thankfully the fix is trivial; you can probably even make it yourself if you’re so inclined (just comment out the offending lines described in the reports above and reboot).

Here’s a workaround I just discovered: Open the keyboard and type these 5 keystrokes: -c-a-t-. That will cause the phantom shell to not listen to commands any more, at least until the next reboot. [italics mine]

Let’s go over that again, shall we? First, Ed highlights the open-source nature of Google’s Android OS, facilitating the discovery of the problem’s source by users. At the same time, through his own blog, Ed quickly shares his own solution to the problem. Now, what more could you ask for?

By the way, a fix for this is part of RC30. So any (legit) G1 users out there, feel free to update as soon as possible.