Every mobile operating system has its foibles, but Android also has to contend with the whims a dozen device manufacturers and fragmented software. Taken together, this situation has resulted in some peculiar Android bugs. Whether it’s a camera that tells time, a screen that just isn’t right, or SMS flying though the ether, Android has a colorful history with software and hardware bugs.

Let’s look at four of the most interesting Android issues…

The Motorola Droid camera bug

The Motorola Droid launched in late 2009 to much fanfare. The Droid was running Android 2.0 and was the first Android device that captured the attention of users, but all was not well at launch. Many users reported their cameras just wouldn’t focus.

Users across the internet dreamed up all sorts of fixes. Some claimed that there was a plastic film that needed to be peeled off the lens. Other were convinced that a good solid cleaning of the glass with a lint-free cloth was the ticket. Still others said it was a hardware flaw. It turns out none of them were right, but it does illustrate the effect of confirmation bias for those obsessively cleaning the lens.

One fine morning a few weeks after the device launched, everyone woke up to a functional camera. A stealth OTA update? No, as it turns out, there was a date-dependent bug in Android 2.0 that would cycle every 24.5 days. So every few weeks, the autofocus would flip between working and not working.

Luckily for users, Google got an update to 2.0.1 out the door just days before the camera was due to cycle back to having poor focus again. Everything was fine in the end, but it will go down as one of the strangest bugs in Android history.

The Nexus One and its sketchy screen

Google’s Nexus One was a big step forward in a lot of ways when it appeared in early 2010. The device was fast, sleek, and had a cool AMOLED screen. Though, it wasn’t all about vibrant colors and perfect blacks in the Nexus One’s screen. A few months after the Nexus launched, one developer got suspicious that the Nexus One screen was behaving badly.

He created a simple multitouch test app that pulled data right from the digitizer. It was discovered that if two points were touched, then the axis were crossed or the points got close to each other, the X – Y coordinates would be flipped. It turns out the Nexus One was built with a mediocre ClearPad 2000 touch sensor, the same hardware used in pre-multitouch devices like the T-Mobile G1.

So as a user moved their fingers around on the screen, the touch points would now be registered in a totally different place. By lifting and repositioning the fingers, all would be well until the flaw was again triggered. Users were understandably upset, but HTC and Google had little to say about the matter. There was no way for software to fix what was fundamentally a hardware issue. To this day, the Nexus One suffers from this same problem, but subsequent phones were designed with better touch sensors.