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iPhone Clock Bug Prevents Alarm Triggers after New Year's

HLdan said:
Honestly it's new years, can't people on MR for once say something positive? Sheesh people, learn to get up on time and to remind yourself of important things rather than depending on your tech device to do it for you. :p
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Yeah Apple should just exit the silly tech device business and do something important...
 
tkatz said:
Yeah, I'll admit its a pretty lame bug, one that should have easily been found (or not introduced at all).
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Not introduced at all. Once it is introduced, it could be quite hard to find. You'd have to switch an iPhone's date to Dec 31st, which would be obviously wrong, and therefore might cause all kinds of problems by itself.

On the other hand, the daylight savings time problem had a reasonable explanation - the alarm would go off 24 hours after it went off the last time, which is reasonable but incorrect twice a year. There is no reason why 1st of January would be handled differently in any way.


Doctor Q said:
Why would January 1 be special to this type of app? Humans notice year changes but don't programs store dates as serial numbers since a starting date years ago?
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"Serial numbers since a starting date" is probably what caused the Daylight Savings Time problem - you get an alarm 8am today, phone did the next alarm 24 x 60 x 60 seconds later, which is wrong twice a year when the day is either 23 or 25 hours. MacOS X and iPhone OS have quite a few different routines to handle dates, and the programmer has to use the right ones. If a chemical process takes exactly 24 hours, and you start it on 8am in the morning, then you want an alarm 24 hours later which may be 9am or 7am the next morning. But there are functions that will give you the time "same time one day later" which should have been used.

With reports that the problem is going to be fixed on Jan 3rd, it seems to be related somehow to the fact that we are still in the last week of 2010, and Jan 3rd will be the first day of Week 1 of 2011.
 
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Yes, I noticed! Lucky I set a second alarm clock, or I could have missed a flight.....
 
saxondale. said:
Now i'm late for work!
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But you made time to post this? :rolleyes:

baryon said:
Okay, that does it! I'm going back to using my Nokia as an alarm. At least it lets me actually choose any MP3 as a ring tone. And it lets me set the snooze time. And it actually rings at the time I set, regardless of daylight saving changes and the new year.

Can't believe they can't get this alarm thing to work, it's like the simplest thing to program, all they have to do is Get the Time, if Time = Alarm Time, then the alarm goes off, dammit! The year has nothing to do with it!
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Oh Super yawn City.
 
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"It was a bug,Dave.":)

But seriously,if you are regularly oversleeping for HOURS because your alarm didn't go off you really need to look at your sleep habits(odd work schedules excepted).
 
Well, that explains why I woke up 12 instead of 9. Thought I'd slept through two alarms on the phone...

Stuff like this is why I always use at least two completely separate different alarm devices if it is something important coming up.
 
SomeDudeAsking said:
Wow, Apple has crap quality control. Then again, programming isn't a strong point for Apple: just look at the horrid mess that is iTunes.
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What a stupid over generalisation. It's not the whole of Apple. Apple is full of very talented programmers and most of the software they produce is either very good or excellent.


Lead iOS Alarm Clock Engineer:
 

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I can confirm this as I was late for work this morning as none of the alarms I set went off as they should have. I never thought something so simple as an alarm clock would have this big of an issue. Just goes to show that should always have a back up plan I.e an old fashioned alarm clock. Oh well all good now. Happy New Years to everyone!
 
I'm no programmer but I would have thought a clock app would not be terribly hard to get right. Clearly it's not only Apple who find it difficult - remember the PS3 clock bug too?
 
We had to get to the airport early on 1st Jan to get to our holiday. We had two iPod touchers in the family, and both were set with alarms. So we figured it had to be a bug because neither of our alarms went off. Glad to be part of a worldwide phenomenon. We got to the airport, but quite late. Fortunately, when we plan timeframes for getting to the airport, we always add a huge buffer, so this time that bugger came in useful. We literally had to run to make the plane. THANKS APPLE, NOT.
 
So what's so special about the 3rd that this bug fixes itself after then?

And for all the discussion about how hard is it to program, etc, they managed to get the actual time right! Does the alarm function have its own clock which is wrong somehow? Do they not run off the same time=x function?
 
This is a pretty unforgivable testing cock up, especially given it's the second time in twelve months.

Things are slipping badly in the iOS team - more importantly, it shows why the stock apps need dedicated, separate, full time developers and why they need to be pulled out of iOS releases to be upgraded separately through the app store.

Phazer
 
ccunning said:
I forget. It's whatever v4 minor version the tetherless jailbreak was first made available on. Unfortunatly I can't check right now. Regardless, it's not the current version whcih seems to be the affected version.
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You sure? Both my iPhone 3GS and my 4th gen touch are both running 4.2.1 (the current version), and the alarm for neither will go off at all unless it's set to be a recurring alarm.
 
I don't even understand how this bug could even exist, the phone has no issues displaying 2011 dates and times, how is the alarm any different
 
Once again I'm late because the iPhone alarm clock has failed me. I'm gonna dig out my Nokia 3310, the alarm clock on there is light years ahead of apple - it actually works! :mad:
 
Conflicting reports

Here's what 9to5Mac is saying:

Reader Aaron F. has let us know that the issue is occurring on his iOS 4.1 iPhone 4 as well (iOS 4.0.2 t00). Let us know if you see the issue on anything earlier. The issue does not appear to be present on iOS 3.x devices.

And Engadget:

it's currently unclear if this is just iOS 4.2.1 or earlier versions as well

As several people have posted here, the bug did not affect their iOS 4 devices. Same for me - my non-recurring alarm that I set last night before midnight went off as expected this morning.

So it's more complex that any of these sites are reporting.
 
Apple should fix alarm clock issue. It is really lame that they can not build a fully functioning alarm clock .
 
damn, wish I saw this sooner.... I was an hour late to work today because none of the 4 alarms I set went off this morning
 
The Phazer said:
This is a pretty unforgivable testing cock up, especially given it's the second time in twelve months.
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Unfortunately, time and clock screwups are not uncommon, partly because nowadays companies tend not to dedicate enough testing resources.

Things are slipping badly in the iOS team - more importantly, it shows why the stock apps need dedicated, separate, full time developers
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Yes, swapping engineers between projects as if you're still a startup _sounds_ cool, but it doesn't make for solid apps. Especially if you use a slogan like "it just works".

Apple has billions in the bank; they could easily hire lots more developers... senior ones... and give each a dedicated piece.

and why they need to be pulled out of iOS releases to be upgraded separately through the app store.
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Good idea.

Roller said:
And Engadget:

it's currently unclear if this is just iOS 4.2.1 or earlier versions as well
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Hopefully Apple was not aware that they had fixed this bug.

It's one thing to not know about a bug. It's quite another if they had found and fixed this one, but did their usual pretending as if it didn't exist. A bug like this, if known, needs to be publicized so users are forewarned.

In the meantime, they get the benefit of the doubt.
 
SomeDudeAsking said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Wow, Apple has crap quality control. Then again, programming isn't a strong point for Apple: just look at the horrid mess that is iTunes.
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Or Final Cut Pro, both of which are STILL in 2011 CARBON based 32 bit applications. While 64 bit may not be needed for iTunes, the fact that they are selling pro apps apps such as Final Cut Pro made with Carbon is an utter disgrace.

Hell, even Adobe moved to Cocoa already. If Adobe can do it, why can't Apple Consumer Electronics? Oh yeah, because they don't care about anything other then iOS, and even then I don't think they care much about the details like a correctly functioning clock.app :mad:



kdarling said:
Hopefully Apple was not aware that they had fixed this bug.

It's one thing to not know about a bug. It's quite another if they had found and fixed this one, but did their usual pretending as if it didn't exist. A bug like this, if known, needs to be publicized so users are forewarned.

In the meantime, they get the benefit of the doubt.
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The last time there was a bug with clock.app a few months ago, Apple Consumer Electronics was warned MONTHS before about it. Yes MONTHS, and they still did nothing.

Oh, and Fortune / CNN is reporting that Apple Consumer Electronics did know about this bug as well.

Link
 
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