IPhone DST bug causing alarms to fail across Europe | Hacker News Reader

IPhone DST bug causing alarms to fail across Europe

engadget.com

22 pointsGarbage18 comments

For a company that survives on consumer confidence I find it incredible that Apple have not released a revision of iOS with an update to solve this issue.

This is how good brands start to erode - if you cant have confidence in a conceivably simple feature of the product then its only one step away from not having any confidence in the product at all.

It is incredibly difficult to get "time" features right, especially recurring alarm/timer features. Daylight savings time only makes it much, much harder. All 3 companies I've worked for have had relatively serious issues with time, time zone, and DST. The most serious being patient monitoring devices that did the "wrong thing" with timezones. All other devices on the network had to account for the problem because years and years of work had gone into validation on the code for this device. Instead of fixing it at the source, the company spent years of developer time working around it at the other end.

Time is hard, so I'm not surprised Apple got it wrong. Thankfully, it's a relatively small usecase.

Amazingly Linux and other Unixes (yeah, OSX too) "get" time quite well. Maybe Apple over-optimized iOS?

As difficult as it is to implement time correctly in the OS, I imagine the timer/alarm apps that Apple wrote don't use any OS features (beyond the "what time is it?" API) so all of the issues usually arise in application code.

The OS itself may, but apps don't always. The 2:30-localtime problem has been an awkward one for cron in the past.

Having an alarm go off at the right time is a relatively small usecase? That's a bit surprising, as alarms seem like a pretty basic feature.

Daylight Saving Time (DST) will end on November 7 in the United States; they still have a week to release a fix.

It's sad but true that us European (or simply non-US) customers are generally handled as second-class customers by most large corporations, this is not specific to Apple.

I don't think Apple is deliberately treating non-US customers as second-class customers. If it wasn't for the Energy Policy Act of 2005 [1], the US would have changed their clocks yesterday as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005#Chang...

Except that we've all known about the new rules for USA DST changeover since 2005.

Yup, this happened to me too this morning.

I even checked specifically for this last night: I was figuring that Apple would internally store the time in UTC and that my alarm time would have changed to an hour later than the usual time. Wouldn't have been ideal but I could have understood that. But no, when I checked my alarm the (display) time was still 8:00 AM.

This morning, I awoke for other reasons a little past 8 and my alarm hadn't gone off. Then, at 9, it did.

For some reason, there is some mismatch between the display time and the actual time, although I couldn't imagine what it would be. I imagine there is some caching of information involved somewhere...

I solve this by setting the TIMER to 8 hours as I go to bed. Then it doesn't matter what time the device "thinks" it is. As a bonus, I'm more likely to believe the value the next day.

I do this because so many of my devices auto-update, fail to audo-update or just don't update at all I don't trust them any more :P

I have no use for alarm clocks. Surprisingly, this work rather well.

I was never late yet.

It was quite funny to hear people's alarm clocks going off randomly this morning on the London Underground.

Hmm, I guessed(evidently wrongly) that the alarms were working by "if set to every monday, when alarm is called, increment the time till next alarm by a week".

Good job that article pointed out that deleting and readding the alarm didn't fix anything.

I'm from the UK with an iPhone 4 and my alarm went off fine this morning.

I haven't upgraded to 4.1 yet though, perhaps this is where the bug manifests itself

Anyone know what model of iPhone this affects? My iPhone 3GS went off at the correct time this morning.

I use a radio alarm as well in anycase.

The problem only occurs if you have a repeating alarm that doesn't repeat every day. If it's non-repeating, or repeats every day, things work fine. For the record, my iPhone 3GS on iOS4.1 exhibited the behaviour this morning (hey, who cares, it's a public holiday in France... of course, it'll still cause problems tomorrow morning)

I should have said, it is set on weekdays.

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