We get tons of notifications everyday on our smartphones but something really bizarre happened with Samsung phone users on February 20 when a mysterious notification from Samsung's Find My Mobile app showed up on millions of Samsung phones throughout the world.
The push notifications l simply said "1", and when you tap on the alert it didn't seem to do anything beyond closing the notification shade. But what in the world was the weird notification all about?
We know that it was to do with "Find My Mobile" app, some users reportedly noticed a spike in the app's battery usage along when the random alert showed up on their Samsung phone. Some curious users even speculated about the cause and looked for any potential fixes for the battery drain issue that came along, but to no avail.
Samsung clarifies
However, the weird notification is nothing to worry about as Samsung later clarified that the messages were simply an accident and were "unintentionally" sent during an internal test.
Samsung's official UK support channel took to Twitter to address the issue after about three hours of the errant messages being sent out. It tweeted that the Find My Mobile notification message was a mistake "sent unintentionally during an internal test."
Samsung also assured that it won't have any effect on the devices that received it and apologized for any inconvenience the issue may have caused to its customers.
What went wrong?
Apparently, someone at Samsung pressed a button that they didn't mean to and this triggered the mass notification during the internal test and it's got nothing to do with someone trying to locate your device without your approval, which some of the user's suspect was the case. Though it is still unclear why the notification said "1" and it's something that shouldn't matter much unless you are digging deeper into conspiracy theories or if you're into numerology and stuff like that.
Find My Mobile app
Samsung's Find My Mobile app allows users of Samsung devices to remotely locate their phones and tablets and lock them in case of theft of loss. The service also let's users back up data on their missing devices to Samsung Cloud, delete local data and block access to Samsung Pay. So, it's no wonder some of the user's freaked out and started speculating as to what it could be.
However, the battery drain issue is another story, but there could be a correlation. However, Samsung's statement didn't mention or address the issue. Moreover, the Find My Phone app doesn't normally require a lot of juice under normal working conditions, so we hope it was just a one-time glitch and not a big. Rest assured, if you own a Samsung devices there's no need to change passwords, or disable notifications or anything like that.
Meanwhile, Samsung isn't the first company to have blasted out such bizarre notifications to millions of devices. To recollect, last year OnePlus too had accidentally blasted some garbled text and Chinese characters in what it later called a failed internal test for a software update.
