Don’t tell the kids, but Google has done what the Grinch couldn’t – stolen Christmas!
OK, they haven’t actually stolen it, but if you’re an Android 4.2 Jelly Bean user you better not have been born in December, because Google have dropped (another) almighty clanger by omitting the month from their stock People/Contacts app.
The bug has been officially reported to Google via the Android Open Source Project (bug 39692). Christian Ulrich, an independent Android developer, has added this plausible explanation of what may have caused the error:
It checks “maxValue” and resets it to “.length – 1” it’s too high. But DatePicker.java (line 140) sets maxValue to 12 and the string array “months” is only 12 entries long so maxValue gets truncated to 11 by the new check in this commit which in the end will skip “December” as it is the 12th and last month.
We’ve confirmed the issue ourselves and also found that if an existing contact already has a birthday in December the display shows December, but the date picker rolls the month on to January!
Now, I know that modern software is incredibly complicated, and there’s always going to be bugs, but really?
Let’s hope that Google can find December and get it back before people stop doing the Christmas shopping.