iPhone alarm bug: now it's the UK's turn Reports from UK readers have been flooding in - OK trickling in - that their iPhone alarms woke them up an hour late today. In other words their phones ignored the switchover to GMT on the early hours of Sunday morning. Oh well - that's another hour to shake off the Halloween booze. This alarm quirk lies in the iPhone …
Mine was an hour late on sunday - thankfully my android woke me up :)
But today was fine, I did select different alarms last night though as I had to get up earlier on Sunday than today (sucks don't it), maybe it only updates the internal 'real time' when the alarm is set.
As such to fix, untick alarm, retick alarm - job done!
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The alarms set for X go off at X+1 hours, i.e. a 9am alarm will go off at 10am GMT. It is rather puzzling since the timezone shift would make you assume the reverse.
It is rather annoying... as one of the commenters said, he nearly missed a flight, and I WAS late for work because of it. That is not particularly acceptable when more and more people rely on their smartphone to remain in touch and manage their lives (including the time they wake up).
The Apple forums point out that deleting the recurring alarm and recreating it does not fix the problem.
If you had an alarm set to go off at 07:00 BST, then perhaps that was stored relative to GMT, i.e. 07:00 GMT +1 hour. When the clocks go back to GMT, the system time changes correctly, but the alarm time is still stored as 07:00 GMT +1 which is now 08:00.
Only conjecture, but it seems to explain why the alarm is 1 hour late. Why they can't just store the alarm time based exactly on the current system time goodness only knows.
Yeah, this happened to me, I'm an hour late into work, ha ha, silly iPhone sheep, blah blah blah.
What I can't get my head round though: If the alarms failed to update with the clock going forward an hour, why didn't it wake me up an hour EARLY, not an hour LATE?
Please help a dumb iPhone user :(
If you had an alarm set for 7am, then it used to go off at 7am....
you put your clock back an hour (which the alarm ignores) and it becomes 6am.
24 hours later at 6am (now called 7am) you expect your alarm to go off, but it doesnt, it goes off 1 hour later 7am (now called 8am), because it didnt get turned back.
the clock setting DID go back the extra hour but the ALARM didnt! so my clock said 05:55 but my alarm didnt go off until 06:55.
it would appear that simply reading the time on the iPhone and then triggering the alarm when: desired alarm time = phone clock time is much to simple for apple programmers!
Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone but sometimes, just sometimes I do feel like a bit of a dick for having one when a monumental fail of these proportions is announced :-)
That's great, but it's also the mistake that is always made when talking about this sort of thing. If you don't want a convergent device, that's great. Good for you. i do, though, and, for me, the iPhone is the best one (currently). Not a fanboy - had a Motorola A780 (early smartphone with GPS) and 2x HTC's running Windows mob before this, and loved them all (despite none being perfect). Android was in infancy when I bought my iPhone, so wasn't a real option. The latest HTC's are doing good things, so next time out will be a real decision again.
You don't want any of the features of a smartphone. Fine. I do, and I'm prepared to accept the odd OS bug that inevitably goes with it...
I can only assume that a clever programmer decided that the alarm code should put the alarm times back an hour at the time change, but did so relative to the clock after it had gone back, or something.
Easily fixed by unticking and then re-ticking the alarm, but at 5am on Monday I wasn't hugely pleased by this....
GJC
I think my Small Child software is bugged as I can't get it to reset it's time to Daylight Saving Mode, the alarm function seems to shut up once I start putting porridge in it though, guess I'll just have to wait until the automatic upgrade gets it to v2.10, stuck on v0.15 at the moment.
"A bit of pain, but something you only have to to do twice a year… unless of course, Apple gets its act together before the end of March, when Northern Hemisphere moves once again to summer time. We think it will."
They will, and they will cover it up and deny there ever was a problem.
Maybe they're setting them wrong?
When the clock updates +1 it automatically moves the alarms +1hr also hence +2hrs from the old time...
Something to do with the internal clock running UTC and the interface clock running with a timezone.. and the alarms originally being set in UTC (needing the +1) and now running from the timezone clock (not needing the +1)...
Its what testing is for...
And it still failed to go off this morning!
I knew of the bug, so I changed the time by a few minutes of my wake up alarm. Still bloody failed.
Luckly my daughter is still on BST and woke up for her 8:30am feed at 7:30... so was only running 30 minutes late.
Now how to reset my daughter to GMT... Tricky.
Really pathetic. It's something fairly high on the minds of Americans since they recently decreed summer would be extended.
All North Americans get really good at time zones as it affects TV schedules ... show is on at 7pm Eastern and 6pm Central. In the West i's different ... showing at 7pm, 8pm Mountain.
USA, Canada, northern Mexico’s border cities
DST Begins 2 a.m. (Second Sunday in March)
DST Ends 2 a.m. (First Sunday in November)
European Union
DST Begins 1 a.m. UTC=GMT (Last Sunday in March)
DST Ends 1 a.m. UTC=GMT (Last Sunday in October)
In winter Canada has 6 time zones, in summer 7 - Saskatchewan doesn't do Daylight Savings.
Funny thing is, for all it's other faults Windows always got time right. Just shows how parochial Jobs really is.
.
Except when it doesn't.
Patches for DST in 2000, 2007 and (oh look!) 2010.
This stuff *should* be easy, but countries keep changing when they switch clocks and it ends up being stupidly complex, so it's easy to make mistakes.
A quick Google turns up patches for pretty much all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and umpteen flavours of UNIX.
Time to get back under that bridge.
On first read I thought that it must mean the alarms went off an hour early which, while a little annoying, should at least not make you late and is "what is expected" from the days of more dumb devices (am I the only person who has an actual alarm clock, rather than relying on my phone?).
This, on the other hand is a pretty inelegant, and potentially costly to the owner, fail -- though not as bad as the device (which I cannot recall) which just crashed when the clocks changed or the old Windows devices I've had which would fail to wake from hibernation randomly.
In conclusion -- just buy a couple of cheap alarms, one mains and one battery, if you really want to ensure you wake in time.
Alarm set for 7, woke up at 20 past, thinking I must have just zombie'd my alarm into submission earlier. Went off in my hand at 8, got cross, still in work 10 minutes early.
I don't know why I don't have a proper alarm clock, I've learned not to trust iPhones as alarms when my 3G had the intermittent locking-up bug that 3.1(?) introduced a year or so ago. If it locked up during the night (which it did) you were screwed.
no such problem with my Android-powered phone - whose testing iOS for Apple? bit naff.
anyway, both Android and iOS devices fail in comparison to the Nokia Symbian phones
which can be switches off and still the alarm operates - perfect and fantastic for either away trips when battery power iw low...or for having phone as alarm but not wanting to be woken by calls, txts, social media updates. its a pity that Android phones and iOS phones havent got this (or licenced this from Nokia)
I got awoken just before 5AM by the taxi driver knocking on the door as he didn't see any lights on in the house. A few minutes later my '4AM' alarm went off.
I was absolutely livid, I just managed to get to the airport for my flight with only a few minutes to spare.
I'm amazed something so trivial can go so wrong.
Re: Daylight savings change and alarm issue
Posted: Nov 2, 2010 4:57 AM in response to: efcop
efcop wrote:
I just changed the date to November 8th i.e. after the US changes the time and presto it works. So it seems that although the phone's time changes correctly the alarm time seems to be linked to the US DST
I just tried doing this (I'm in the UK) and it works for me too. Looks like your analysis is correct.
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2594030&start=156&tstart=0
So it looks like they did ALL their testing using the US daylight saving time zone and (hopefully) these problems will go away on the 8th. Except for those of us who have worked around this by setting our alarms back an hour!
Tried setting the time.date manually. Did nothing. Set a new alarm, it rang. Reset the time and occurance to match her old alarm, did not go off. Hmmmm. A one off alarm worked, one repeated on weekdays didn't. Set alarm to go off everyday, worked. Problem seems to be interaction with calendar. An alarm set to work EVERYDAY of the week will ring. One set to go off on specific days may not work. Good Luck!
Apparently. Yes, I still have a recurring weekday alarm that's going off one hour later than it should. I want my iPhone to adjust automatically so the "workaround" is pants. As is setting one every day before I go to bed. As is having to set the alarm to the wrong time for recurring ones and the right time for individual alarms. I would have thought Apple could afford to pay for decent coders...
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