
Hey Android, why no love for UTC? - mikelabatt
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=39099
======
guelo
This is only issue #164 on the list of most annoying Android bugs as measured
by the number of people that got so annoyed that they hunted down the
unfriendly Android open source issue tracker, searched through countless other
issues for the one they were annoyed by, logged in or created an account, and
starred the issue. Some of these bugs have been open for over 7 years.

[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&colsp...](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&colspec=ID%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars%20Reporter%20Opened&sort=-stars&num=100&start=0)

~~~
paulojreis
I remember 7 years ago following this one:
[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1109](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1109)
(Alarm clock produces no sound or vibration). I was an "early adopter" of
Android and, as result of this bug, got late for work two or three times. :)

They marked it as "obsolete", but - to be honest - I still wouldn't trust an
Android as my alarm for anything.

~~~
theandrewbailey
The few times I've used it, the Android alarm app has worked right every time.

~~~
to3m
I'm confident in saying the countdown timer is not 100% reliable, because
several times the screen has very obviously said something like "-2'15" when
the alarm has gone off. I didn't really pay this much mind this the first few
times, because I mostly use it for timing food, and most food isn't sensitive
to an extra 2 minutes. But then one day I was timing a bread roll (8 minutes)
and after 10 minutes it was noticeably charred.

If they can't get the countdown timer right I don't see why there can't also
be bugs in the alarm clock too. I use it every day, and it's mostly reliable,
but I'm suspicious it's failed to go off a couple of times...

~~~
rtkwe
I think that's an intentional choice to show you how long past the timer you
are if you haven't cleared the timer. It could be useful in some situations
especially if you didn't notice the timer and need to know how ruined your
food is going to be.

~~~
sp332
t03m means that the alarm didn't start going off until the timer was 2 minutes
overdue.

~~~
to3m
Yes - this is also with the phone right next to me the whole time, so it's not
a case of me missing something. I assume it's possible for the phone to go
into some kind of sleep mode whereby timers are checked much less frequently.
Seems a bit daft to allow this if there's an active countdown timer that could
expire before the next check...

~~~
dilap
It's really a shame that our two major mobile platforms are a choice between
insanely shoddy software and insanely victorian censorship.

------
cmrdporcupine
Sad. I have a similar example.

Android also conflates language code (say, en-GB) with physical location for
many apps. And does not provide a Canadian English (en-CA) -- so if you want
to not have the phone constantly spellchecking your emails incorrectly when
you type colour, neighbour, etc, and switch it to en-GB to get it to shut up
it then starts giving you UK news in the News & Weather app, and reads your
turn by turn directions with an English accent.

And there's a similar ticket open about the subject. Also ignored for many
years by the Android team.

I've thought about raising a ticket internally (I work at Google) about it,
but I imagine it would suffer the same fate.

~~~
jnky
On a related note, I live in Germany and like setting my device's language to
en-US. I like the US news, as they are personalized to my taste anyway.

What I dislike is that temperature and distance in a couple of apps are now in
US units, which I find unreasonable. I should be able to choose SI units if I
want to.

Windows has been getting locale settings right for ages now. I find it sad
that Android is so far behind in that regard.

~~~
wtbob
> What I dislike is that temperature and distance in a couple of apps are now
> in US units, which I find unreasonable. I should be able to choose SI units
> if I want to.

And I'm in the opposite situation: I prefer British English but want
traditional units only.

This really should be user-settable. Heck, even outside of America some folks
prefer decimetres over centimetres!

~~~
ktRolster
_even outside of America some folks prefer decimetres over centimetres!_

? Isn't a decimetre a metric measurement?

~~~
lwf
Yes, and I'm guessing gp was suggesting that I might want my units in dm
rather than cm.

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staplung
Last I checked, the stock Clock app has a similar dysfunctionality: in the
World Clock tab you can add multiple timezones but there is no option for
either UTC _or_ GMT. Weirdly, many of the listed cities are just plain wrong.
IIRC, it had Santa Fe, NM listed as UTC+0:00.

~~~
anamexis
At least in latest iOS, UTC is an option in the World Clock tab. It's also an
option for system time zone.

~~~
atemerev
It wasn't this way a few releases ago. I remember setting up Liberia time zone
when I wanted UTC.

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Artoemius
Thanks for this post. Now I'll wait a bit longer before moving to an Android
phone.

From a developer's point of view, Android is known to be a mess. I thought the
reason was the lack of organization between the numerous manufacturers. Now I
see that the reason is even more fundamental.

~~~
skelsey
Please don't let this be the reason you don't switch to Android. I think this
is a stupid bug to exist, but it hardly affects most people.

~~~
jleahy
Maybe not most people, but Iceland is a relatively big country to completely
exclude your product from (especially for such a silly reason).

If the OP were Icelandic I think that'd be a pretty good reason not to switch
to Android.

~~~
takno
Reykjavik is available on the world clock, and if you go there it picks up the
correct timezone automatically. The only missing part is that the system
timezone widget which you would never normally use doesn't have it.

Also, while excluding a country would be a fairly crappy thing to do, Iceland
is the 174th largest country in the world by population, so it's not big
relative to very much at all

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lostcolony
This is endemic to a lot of Google products it seems. Google Calendar has no
recognition of UTC/GMT either. It's really irksome since a lot of calendar
invites I get that are sent out to global participants have their times in
UTC/GMT, and I have to manually convert them to create calendar reminders that
fire at the right time.

Any time I, as a human, have to do something that a computer can trivially do,
and get right -every time-, is an indication of seriously bad UX.

~~~
takno
I've never had a problem with calendar invites in other timezones on Google,
and I suspect a number of those come in UTC. Is it possible that the UTC
invites you are getting don't actually have the timezone attached? In the
absence of a stated timezone I'd have thought assuming the user's current
timezone was the safest course of action

~~~
lostcolony
You can't create a calendar invite in UTC. Period. This was a year ago; I
don't remember the specifics, but either the invite I had was for UTC, and
Google Calendar put it in in my own timezone, despite it being clearly UTC, or
I had to enter it by hand, and there is no way to specify UTC/GMT by hand in
Google calendar. The issue is not an import issue, it's that Google calendar
literally does not have the option, at least that I can find. You have to
select a region, and there is no special 'UTC' or 'GMT' region, and clicking
on the UK does not give you "Greenwich" or "GMT" either.

Though per another comment, yes, if you happen to know a locale whose timezone
is the same as UTC/GMT, you can use that, but that's still hilariously
unfriendly to the user.

------
CiPHPerCoder
If you ever want a crushing sense of "this project is totally mismanaged",
just read its issue tracker.

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swiley
There are lots of tiny little issues like this in android that have been fixed
for a long time in things like GNU. The worst part about android is that it's
just so incredibly huge there's no way for anyone to come in and tweak little
things.

~~~
NoGravitas
It's actually pretty straightforward to come in and tweak little things, and
there are lots of projects that do it. The problem is that nothing ever gets
accepted upstream, and (therefore?) lots of projects never try.

~~~
swiley
How do you go about doing this? Last time I started I was told to pull down
100 GB of code. That's ~ the monthly limit of my connection so that wasn't
happening

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chris_wot
Damn, this was lodged in 2012!

This seems like a complete no-brainer.

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Animats
They could call it Z, for Zulu, as the military does.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Z, for Zulu

I think it might be the other way around.

~~~
Terr_
Right: It was designated with the letter "Z" quite a long time ago, and only
later did military (esp. NATO) communication-guides bring "Zulu" into the
picture, as a way to disambiguate individual letters like Z, T, C, D, etc.
when spoken. </joke-frog-dissection>

~~~
drauh
I thought "Zulu" was just the common phonetic code for "Z", like Alfa, Bravo,
Charlie, etc.

~~~
theandrewbailey
For reference, the entire list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#Code_wo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#Code_words)

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motoboi
I would be very glad if they just find a way to make android adjust the clock
to the local timezone when I'm traveling. There is a option for that,
obviously, but it simple don't work. iPhones and macs take 2 minutes or less
to update the clock, but here I am, two days at my destination, and my Nexus 5
still shows home time.

~~~
zonged
Turn off Data and let the phone connect to a local cell network, as soon as it
connects it'll update the time.

~~~
motoboi
I wish it was that easy. I tried, since I bought this phone, all combinations
of turning off wifi, data, airplane mode, shutdown phone, hard reboot phone.
;(

~~~
tetromino_
It requires two things:

(1) your mobile service provider needs to actually provide NITZ information
(I've encountered a Russian provider that simply failed to do it); and

(2) your phone needs to be configured to use that timezone information
(settings → date and time → automatic time zone).

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Raticide
But do you know how much work that would be? It could take them multiple
minutes to implement!

~~~
jschwartzi
And twice as long to code review! Meanwhile they're spending time on really
useful features like full-screen album art that you can't turn off on your
lock screen.

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takno
I'm not aware of anybody outside of IT who uses or even understands UTC in
place of GMT, so making this change would be a significant backwards step in
usability.

~~~
x1798DE
The problem to me seems like they are only offering political / locational
zones. It does not seem like it would be a significant step backwards to offer
an option to set your time zone to a manual fixed offset, which is all the
people on the tracker seem to want.

~~~
takno
Most people get timezone set correctly automatically to their current
location, including folks in Iceland. Specialist users who want to do
something odd might discover the unloved system settings widget (it's missing
on a lot of phones anyway) and want that to cover their use case, which it
couldn't without getting too complex for most users. The specialist timezones
are available however, they just need an app like timezone changer to pick
them.

~~~
x1798DE
I want advocating switching the main time zone selector over to a text box
that says, "Enter a valid POSIX time zone string", I was suggesting that at
the bottom of the list of selectable time zones (which you only reach
generally if you turn off automatic time zone selection) there be a button
that says, "choose a fixed offset". Seems like a no brainer.

