'GMT Bug' in iOS 8 Calendar Syncing Causing Time Zone Confusion for Users

[IJ Reilly]

You took it out of context. Mentioned atomic clocks over the source of the data and not the accuracy. Again, this bug is a big UI bug from a junior Apple employee at the keyboard and a lack of good source code reviews. When Steve was around, the team who let this bug get out would be ex-Apples employee consulting to top 100 app developers by now.

Sorry for seemingly taking your comment out of context, but the point I was making was a different one. It is not a trivial problem for a calendar to know what you intended when you added an appointment to your calendar and then changed time zones. The generic "this never would have happened when Steve was alive" is not an answer. (If only because lots of goofs happened when Steve was very much alive.)

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Try having a meeting with people in different time zones and you'll see that your opinion isn't valid for all use cases. In fact, when you put your flight out of Paris in your calendar in your own timezone, you in fact put the wrong time. All you have to do is when you add the calendar event say

Flight #xxx from CDG to YYZ at 11:00am CET

Problem solved...

Yep. Say you made two appointments in your office in New York before flying to Paris: one to call your office at noon the next day, the other the time for your flight back to New York. How is the calendar going to know which one is local to what time zone, if you don't tell it?

 

[baryon]

Try having a meeting with people in different time zones and you'll see that your opinion isn't valid for all use cases. In fact, when you put your flight out of Paris in your calendar in your own timezone, you in fact put the wrong time. All you have to do is when you add the calendar event say

Flight #xxx from CDG to YYZ at 11:00am CET

Problem solved...

That's cool, I didn't know you can type in the time zone like that! Though it doesn't work with "Floating" time (unspecified time zone) which would be perfect for me, as that way 9am (Floating) is always 9am.

 

[TimelessOne]

You took it out of context. Mentioned atomic clocks over the source of the data and not the accuracy. Again, this bug is a big UI bug from a junior Apple employee at the keyboard and a lack of good source code reviews. When Steve was around, the team who let this bug get out would be ex-Apples employee consulting to top 100 app developers by now.

And there you have why Apple was ranked so poorly time and time again by developers as a happy place to work. Fear is the wrong way to motivate employees. This like this are an example of a failure at multiple locations.

Even experience programers could make this error. But now you have a failure at developer, Code review, QA, and yet another failure at regression testing.


That is 4 chances that it got missed. I can see how the develop missed it but QA has zero excuse for it as they should be testing out layer cases. My guess is they coded it to work with iCal and apple own stuff but failed to address other common places you import calendar data from. QA should of caught that one.

That and yet another example of issues that get out when you over work a development group with to few people with do many demands.

 

[bkaus]

I'm not fully convinced this is an apple problem. I was seeing a simular issue viewing an ics feed from a website. I started looking into it and found the format of the file provided was not to the official calendar file spec.

Of course, would be good to accept all input data even if specified incorrectly... But specs exist for a reason.

Specifically, the vendor was violating this part of the RFC.

The "TZID" property parameter MUST NOT be applied to DATE
properties and DATE-TIME or TIME properties whose time values are
specified in UTC.

 

[Morac]

I am experiencing this bug on my iOS devices running 8.1.3, but instead of the times showing as GMT, they show as CST. Actually they show as both EST and CST, but when I got to edit them, they have Chicago as the Time Zone instead of New York (EST), which is my local time zone. I think my exchange server might be in CST.

I'm not sure why I'm seeing CST, while others see GMT. Either way it's still wrong.

 

[jeremyhu]

This is nothing compared to the bug (it's actually a feature but I refuse to call it that) in OS X's calendar which changes the TIME of ALL events (in the past, present and future) if you simply move your computer into a different country.

Nope. It didn't change the time of the event. You changed the way that the event should be represented by moving to a different timezone. The event is still set to occur at the exact same point in time, but that is just expressed differently depending on where you are located.

I mean holy hell, you just VISIT Paris and suddenly your flight is 5 hours earlier than it should be just because you didn't specify that at the time when you will be looking at the screen, you will be in the GMT+01 time zone.

Yes. Go figure! You add incorrect information into your calendar, and your system dutifully reports back to you exactly what you incorrectly input into it. Bad data in gets you bad data out.

And no turning on Time Zone Support doesn't solve this.

It works quite well for me. Perhaps you're just not using it correctly. When you enable time zone support, you get to choose what time zone your calendar is shown as (in the title bar) and you get to choose the timezone that your events are represented in (when editing an event's details).

 

[Morac]

It works quite well for me. Perhaps you're just not using it correctly. When you enable time zone support, you get to choose what time zone your calendar is shown as (in the title bar) and you get to choose the timezone that your events are represented in (when editing an event's details).

If time zone support is off, iOS is supposed to display events using the time zone in your current location. If it doesn't that's a bug.

 

[Nicky G]

This is nothing compared to the bug (it's actually a feature but I refuse to call it that) in OS X's calendar which changes the TIME of ALL events (in the past, present and future) if you simply move your computer into a different country. I mean holy hell, you just VISIT Paris and suddenly your flight is 5 hours earlier than it should be just because you didn't specify that at the time when you will be looking at the screen, you will be in the GMT+01 time zone.

And no turning on Time Zone Support doesn't solve this.

Paper calendars are still far more reliable than ones made by Apple.

Calendars should not know about the existence of time zones at all. It's a calendar, not a world clock. A meeting at 5pm is a meeting at 5pm, period. I don't care where it is, surely I know what the current time is in the current location I happen to be in.

You do realize that calendar events can have invitees from multiple time zones, right? Conference calls, webinars, etc.?

 

[baryon]

You do realize that calendar events can have invitees from multiple time zones, right? Conference calls, webinars, etc.?

Yes, and I really do understand the usefulness of multi-time-zone events. However, as someone who does NOT want to keep track of time zones in events, I don't like being forced to use them. I don't use invites, I don't get conference calls, I don't care about time zones, and I just want 9am to be 9am regardless of where I happen to be in the world. There are only two ways to do that: Specify "floating" (or any time zone as long as it's always the same one) as a time zone EACH TIME you create an event (it can't default to that), or in the top right corner, keep changing the time zone to whichever time zone you were in at the time you created the event. Which is a pain.

If my flight from London lands in Paris at 8pm, but I create the event in London before I actually fly, then by the time I land, the event will CHANGE to show 9pm, which is confusing. I land at 8pm. Period. I don't want to think about time zones. It's obviously 8pm in the country that I land in.

Sure I understand this can be extremely useful, but it would be nice to be able to choose whether I want to use this feature or not as it can be very confusing and simply incorrect. There is NO WAY to see all of your events in whatever time zone they were created. You have to choose ONE time zone and see all of your events in that time zone.

 

[TheAppleFairy]

IphoneHacks.com is reporting that the bug is fixed in 8.2 beta 5.

 

[WildCowboy]

IphoneHacks.com is reporting that the bug is fixed in 8.2 beta 5.

That's just based on the Tweet we linked in our 8.2 post yesterday...not a whole lot of evidence behind it.

We've actually just seen a couple reports that it may be fixed even for 8.1.3 users as of just a short time ago (no update necessary). Can anybody who was affected test and see?

 

[TheAppleFairy]

That's just based on the Tweet we linked in our 8.2 post yesterday...not a whole lot of evidence behind it.

We've actually just seen a couple reports that it may be fixed even for 8.1.3 users as of just a short time ago (no update necessary). Can anybody who was affected test and see?

Interesting, my wife did the update to 8.1.3 a couple of days ago and she was still having the problem. I will ask her to try it again.

 

[Le Big Mac]

If my flight from London lands in Paris at 8pm, but I create the event in London before I actually fly, then by the time I land, the event will CHANGE to show 9pm, which is confusing. I land at 8pm. Period. I don't want to think about time zones. It's obviously 8pm in the country that I land in.

I think that you're probably just in the great minority here - consider the reverse flight, where you would land before you departed. Most people wouldn't want a flight spanning negative time on their calendar - that would create even more confusion.

On the topic, 8.1.3 still has the bug (or "feature")

 

[qbcall11]

I can confirm that as of this afternoon, the bug seems to be fixed.

 

[Morac]

'GMT Bug' in iOS 8 Calendar Syncing Causing Time Zone Confusion for Users

I can confirm that as of this afternoon, the bug seems to be fixed.

I can confirm it's still broken as of right now.

Just tested it and on one iOS device I set an exchange calendar with EST time and my other iOS device is displaying CST when I edit it.

What's odd though is when I look at the event it displays both local (EST) and CST time, while editing is only CST. That hasn't changed though as it was like that before.

 

[JG in SB]

Google = Fixed MS Exchange = Persists

I can confirm that as of this afternoon, the bug seems to be fixed.

It's fixed if you sync with Google Calendar. Google did something on their back-end. I am pretty sure what they did was to mask their server clock time zone setting from being advertised to synced clients. As a result, the GMT Bug can't acquire it, and the receiving iOS devices (which are ALL DEVICES, including the originator because of how Google's sync is implemented) look for this time zone data but since it is missing, they can't transpose your appointments anymore. Google basically removed a critical link in the chain that is required for the bug to manifest.

At the very same time, the GMT Bug is alive and well for users of MS Exchange. For me, this basically serves as 100% confirmation this is a BUG in iOS and was never due to Google, Exchange etc. as Apple tried to claim for months....blaming others for a problem its own programmers generated, and its quality testers failed to catch.

Another solid indication that the Google fix was implemented by Google, and not by Apple, is that it occurred for Google users without them having to lift a finger or do anything. All of a sudden things just started working!! That's because GOOGLE did something on their end

I don't know what to say to the people I have run into on forums who appear to believe that Apple secretly created a fix, but only for Google Calendar users, and then somehow secretly pushed this fix out to everyone AND installed it on all those people's devices without the user's consent or acknowledgment. Does Apple now employ NINJAS?

It's funny that anyone believes Apple is all-powerful and infallible. Or any company for that manner. It's ironic that the same people who adamantly insisted that the GMT Bug was either not a bug, not caused by Apple, or both of the above, are the very same people who now credit Apple for fixing it, rather than crediting Google who obviously is the one who fixed it for Google users only.

I'm optimistic that Apple actually has fixed this in 8.2, but it is a bummer to have to wait possibly two months to receive the benefit of that.

 

[Bhang]

This HAS to be APPLE's ISSUE !

I ONLY use Apple calendar app and do not have or use any 3rd party calendar apps, including google. I enter my appointments into my iphone 5 by hand and it still converts them to GMT. This is unbelievably frustrating when my appointment reminders starts ringing at 4am. This is a completely ridiculous bug that should have been fixed months ago. All of the posts I read online seem to be related to google calendar, however this is not the case here. Is there a way to fix this or are we at the mercy of Apple?

Sorry ahead of time if this has been answered but I got tired of reading hijacked posts of people complaining and arguing back and forth on unrelated issues.

 

[TheAppleFairy]

I ONLY use Apple calendar app and do not have or use any 3rd party calendar apps, including google. I enter my appointments into my iphone 5 by hand and it still converts them to GMT. This is unbelievably frustrating when my appointment reminders starts ringing at 4am. This is a completely ridiculous bug that should have been fixed months ago. All of the posts I read online seem to be related to google calendar, however this is not the case here. Is there a way to fix this or are we at the mercy of Apple?

Sorry ahead of time if this has been answered but I got tired of reading hijacked posts of people complaining and arguing back and forth on unrelated issues.

It was fixed a couple of weeks ago. Apparently for everyone but you?

 

[Morac]

It was fixed a couple of weeks ago. Apparently for everyone but you?

It wasn't fixed. Google implemented a work around for people using Google calendar, but that doesn't help people using company or personal Exchange servers.

 

[TheAppleFairy]

It wasn't fixed. Google implemented a work around for people using Google calendar, but that doesn't help people using company or personal Exchange servers.

It worked for my wife and I. We are using a personal URL through Google apps set up as exchange. The problem was there, now it is fixed by whatever google did.

 

[Bhang]

Read before you write

It was fixed a couple of weeks ago. Apparently for everyone but you?

Maybe you should read before you write.
I do not use Google Calendar. I strictly use Apple Calendar. And if it were fixed I would no longer be having issues!

 

[TheAppleFairy]

Maybe you should read before you write.
I do not use Google Calendar. I strictly use Apple Calendar. And if it were fixed I would no longer be having issues!

I read it, I use the apple calendar app too. Not sure what you think I didn't read.

The bug exist between the apple calendar app and google servers. That is people on gmail and anybody hosting their email through Google apps.

 

[C DM]

Maybe you should read before you write.
I do not use Google Calendar. I strictly use Apple Calendar. And if it were fixed I would no longer be having issues!

So sounds like it's a different unrelated underlying issue in that case, right?

 

[Morac]

The bug exist between the apple calendar app and google servers. That is people on gmail and anybody hosting their email through Google apps.

I think you are confused. The bug exists between Apple's calendar app and any Exchange server. That Google happens to use Exchange for calendar sync, doesn't mean the problem only exists between Google and Apple.

As I said, Google changed the settings on their Exchange server to work around the bug, but that doesn't fix the underlying bug, which is in Apple's code.

 

[TheAppleFairy]

I think you are confused. The bug exists between Apple's calendar app and any Exchange server. That Google happens to use Exchange for calendar sync, doesn't mean the problem only exists between Google and Apple.

As I said, Google changed the settings on their Exchange server to work around the bug, but that doesn't fix the underlying bug, which is in Apple's code.

No kidding, we know Google fixed something on their end. Nobody has reported any issues except Gmail users, and now one guys here. The confusion is on his end. And if his company isn't using Google apps to host its email he should report the bug to Apple.


Also if the problem exist with MS exchange servers as well, it has already been stated that apple has fixed the issue with iOS 8.2 b5 so a fix will be out from Apple soon anyway. Which makes me wonder if Google will have to reverse something they already changed.