Some Apple Watch Series 4 Models Caught in Reboot Loop Due to Daylight Saving Time Bug

[MacRumors]

Some Apple Watch Series 4 owners in Australia experienced crashes and reboots on Saturday due to a bug that surfaced because of the daylight saving time change (via 9to5Mac).

According to Reddit users hit by the Apple Watch bug, the root of the problem appears to be the Infograph Modular face's Activity complication, which displays a timeline graph with hourly data for the user's Move calories, Exercise minutes, and Stand hours.

When daylight saving time (DST) lops an hour off the typical 24-hour day, the Activity complication is apparently unable to compute the change and draw the timeline graph with only 23 hours, which throws the Apple Watch into an endless reboot loop until the battery runs out.

According to reports, the bug corrected itself when the date rolled over the next day and the normal 24-hour day was reinstated, but some users were able to restore normal function to their watch before then by removing the Infograph Modular watch face via the iOS Watch app.

This isn't the first time Apple has been caught out by daylight saving time changes, but the company has a few weeks yet to fix this latest DST bug before it happens again when Europe and the U.S. change their clocks on October 28 and November 4, respectively.

Article Link: Some Apple Watch Series 4 Models Caught in Reboot Loop Due to Daylight Saving Time Bug

 

[jezbd1997]

My Infograph Modular was unusable yesterday when I tried to add the Activity complication, reported the bug to Apple straight away with a couple of videos. The Watch app would crash when trying to add the Activity complication and the Watch would restart each time trying to add it.
Least it wasn't on one of my current faces or I'd be stuck in a loop!

 

[simonmet]

Correction: the changeover happens on early Sunday morning, not Saturday, but this is still Saturday in the US, ‘cause we live in the future!

Don’t you love time zones?

 

[Reason077]

Seems a little ironic that a Watch, of all things, can’t handle the DST change correctly.

 

[coolfactor]

Seems a little ironic that a Watch, of all things, can’t handle the DST change correctly.

Dealing with timezones and human-made exceptions to normal time cycles, such as Daylight Savings Time, is complex stuff! Even harder to test! I give Apple full credits for doing their best with this. But I am surprised it hasn't been fixed in some low-level library shared across all of their platforms.

 

[allenvanhellen]

I’m getting tired of Apple rushing stuff and leaving things undone. They may be small issues, but they’re growing in number.

 

[JohnApples]

Meanwhile my S4 has been about 8 hours off on the Timelapse face and Apple can’t seem to offer a solution to fix what I thought would be a simple bug.

 

[nt5672]

Seems a little ironic that a Watch, of all things, can’t handle the DST change correctly.

That is what happens when the developer, Apple in this case, indiscriminately shifts development teams between projects with no one responsible over time for the key technical areas (in this case time).

Apple has had similar problems IIRC with iOS and appears to have not learnt a thing from that. Most likely because the people that worked on that project are either no longer at Apple or working on something completely different. This is an entry level engineering mistake and as such results from Apple management's failure to get properly trained people to work on the project.

As someone else commented, time is more complex that it looks on the surface, that does not excuse Apple for being sloppy and careless. Again we have proof that Apple management does not care about quality as long as they hit the marketing deadline. Anyone that buys an initial release of an Apple product is a fool these days because we know that they will have problems and we know Apple will avoid responsibility for as long as possible, and we know all of the team working on this years new product will be reassigned as soon as the product ships, or at least that is how it seems.

The only way to change this attitude from Apple is to complain loudly, write to the media, or otherwise make it painful for Apple to release products that are not well tested and ready, especially for their essential functions. Come on time problems on a watch? Thats like steering problems on a car. Leaky roof on a new roof. Lets not set the performance bar so low here that Apple gets a pass. No one else would.

 

[newellj]

Correction: the changeover happens on early Sunday morning, not Saturday, but this is still Saturday in the US, ‘cause we live in the future!

Don’t you love time zones?

Totally, even within a time zone, going to the other side, or other end, of the time zone can be interesting. Changing days is arbitrary and a little bit of a mind-bender. Needless to say, those of us in NA appreciate those of you Antipodes serving as beta testers. . (meant in good will and good humor)

 

[chrono1081]

Dealing with timezones and human-made exceptions to normal time cycles, such as Daylight Savings Time, is complex stuff! Even harder to test! I give Apple full credits for doing their best with this.

Bingo. People have no clue how complex date and time programming is. I dread every time I have to do it.

 

[shareef777]

It's 2018, why do we still have DST, and even more importantly, why do we still have DST bugs!?

 

[Nozuka]

I don't see a problem that they forgot about the time change on the complication. Can happen to the best of us.

But i'm a bit disappointed, that this complication bug reboots the whole watch. it should just kill the complication.

 

[Mansu944]

It's 2018, why do we still have DST, and even more importantly, why do we still have DST bugs!?

Because we love the sun staying up until 9pm during the summer.

 

[Solver]

Bingo. People have no clue how complex date and time programming is. I dread every time I have to do it.

Time is simple. It becomes more complicated when people try to measure it based on where they are. It becomes even more complicated when there are exceptions all over the world, which can be changed by political whims. Programmers do have a tough time with this.

 

[Elijen]

Good that there are literally no devices in Europe yet so nobody experienced the problem

 

[iGeek2014]

It's 2018, why do we still have DST, and even more importantly, why do we still have DST bugs!?

Agreed.

Get the reasons behind it and I know there’s possible safety implications with it too... but wish we could put them forward at the end of March 2019 (in the U.K.) then leave them forward for good!

I know it would be darker for longer in the winter months come morning time but an extra bit of light in the evening would be nicer.

 

[farewelwilliams]

Dealing with timezones and human-made exceptions to normal time cycles, such as Daylight Savings Time, is complex stuff! Even harder to test! I give Apple full credits for doing their best with this. But I am surprised it hasn't been fixed in some low-level library shared across all of their platforms.

i’ve been there before, time is a mindf*ck to deal wih.

but with that said, daylight savings is the most obvious thing to test for in a device that deals with time. QA completely failed this one.

i understand if it was something super rare like...leap second. but daylight savings happens every year.

 

[usarioclave]

It's funny, Apple always has problems like this. Wasn't there some alarm bug that always used to occur around the daylight/standard switchover?

 

[jwsmiths]

It's 2018, why do we still have DST, and even more importantly, why do we still have DST bugs!?

Could be worse...
https://it.slashdot.org/story/07/02/25/2038217/software-bug-halts-f-22-flight

 

[Mac 128]

Seems a little ironic that a Watch, of all things, can’t handle the DST change correctly.

It's not a watch. ;-)

It's 2018, why do we still have DST, and even more importantly, why do we still have DST bugs!?

Because we love the sun staying up until 9pm during the summer.

Agreed.

Get the reasons behind it and I know there’s possible safety implications with it too... but wish we could put them forward at the end of March 2019 (in the U.K.) then leave them forward for good!

I know it would be darker for longer in the winter months come morning time but an extra bit of light in the evening would be nicer.

I've longe proposed that everyone should advance the clock 1/2 hour between the two standards worldwide, and keep it that way year round. Many argue DST is no longer necessary as the world has moved away from an agrarian based economy, and 1/2 hour would be a reasonable compromise for the elimination of a confusing and hazardous practice.

 

[PlainviewX]

Because we love the sun staying up until 9pm during the summer.

That's where it should stay. Forget about Falling back. Spring ahead or life!

 

[H2SO4]

Dealing with timezones and human-made exceptions to normal time cycles, such as Daylight Savings Time, is complex stuff! Even harder to test! I give Apple full credits for doing their best with this. But I am surprised it hasn't been fixed in some low-level library shared across all of their platforms.

Apple seem to have clock problems on a regular basis. The number of times the alarm clock doesn't go off due to a bug over the years is verging on ridiculous.
I give them no credit. I don't remember this issue on any other OS, mobile or otherwise.

 

[busuan]

for()
{
Day-o, day-ay-ay-o;
Daylight come and he wan' go home;
}

 

[petsounds]

Dealing with timezones and human-made exceptions to normal time cycles, such as Daylight Savings Time, is complex stuff! Even harder to test! I give Apple full credits for doing their best with this. But I am surprised it hasn't been fixed in some low-level library shared across all of their platforms.

DST -- and many more incredibly weird calendar issues throughout history -- is generally handled properly by Apple's Date APIs. The problem in this case seems to be a developer who created a graph UI that expected to display exactly 24 hours of data, not 23. They really shouldn't be rebooting the whole watch just because a complication crashed though. It's also a rather poor look for Apple that any date-related code running on watchOS is not thoroughly QA'd for Date/Time issues.

 

[Dave-Z]

Bingo. People have no clue how complex date and time programming is. I dread every time I have to do it.

Agreed. Databases, user input, etc., etc. I do not mind. But having to deal with time is a nightmare.
[doublepost=1539029004][/doublepost]

I've longe proposed that everyone should advance the clock 1/2 hour between the two standards worldwide, and keep it that way year round. Many argue DST is no longer necessary as the world has moved away from an agrarian based economy, and 1/2 hour would be a reasonable compromise for the elimination of a confusing and hazardous practice.

Frankly, I just wish we'd ditch time zones altogether. I'm totally comfortable switching everywhere to UTC and waking up at what would then be 1:00 p.m.