- Edited
sms sent/receive time accuracy
(an Android design choice, as I understand it) is something that really bugs me since I moved to Android/GOS from BB OS10.
My phone is mostly off. When I turn on the Android/GOS phone to check for sms, the sms sent/receive time
for any sms whilst the phone was off will always be the time my phone received the message which will be the time I turned the phone on
and not the time the other party sent the message - bonkers. When I first realised this ridiculous deisgn decision, I did a bit of research about it.
Someone here has also recently started a post 'Help with SMS'. My new post is probably relevant to that but I think better as a separate thread because it is a more generalised observation about AOSP/sms.
If you are interested, I really recommend a read of this comment. I can't vouch for the accuracy, but it does seem an authoritative statement to me. I'm including a small extract:
https://xdaforums.com/t/q-sms-time-sent-vs-received.2695980/#post-51414758
How SMS are received/stored in Android:
In Android there exists a system wide database where the received SMS messages get stored into. When a SMS arrives, a system service parses the raw PDU packet it received from the modem part of your phone and stores the SMS data into the system database.The problem:
When implementing this SMS database and the receiving service Google made two decisions:
- they decided that the timestamp from the provider might not be reliable and
- they initially only included ONE "date" field in the system database (you can see the structure of this database table in old Android 2.2 here: Android 2.2 SMS database structure).
As a result we ended up having only one time field for a SMS and the SMS receiver service filled this time field with the current time when it receives the SMS (because it doesn't trust the SMSC timestamp).
We all know GOS must minimise changes from AOSP to minimise maintenance burden and this is not a security issue, but I do wish I could reverse what I regard as a really poor design choice by Google/AOSP.
Also, hope it is OK if I mention, and please don't misunderstand me; if folk here want me to write longer posts like this, please will you give me a little like/feedback so I know I'm not wasting my time making noise in a vacuum or failing to realise that people would prefer I made less noise :)
I would welcome someone here to confirm the accuracy of the above statements about sms receipt times and for a discussion on this from the wise folk on this forum.