

3.5% of Android phone clocks are wrong by more than an hour - exap
http://opensignal.com/reports/timestamps/

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mindcrime
My Android phone (a Motorola Atrix) has issues when I cross timezones. For the
past few months, I've been travelling between Chicago and Raleigh on a near
weekly basis, and I find pretty consistently that when I land in either city,
my phone doesn't update the time from the network, to reflect the local time
zone. So, if it were showing the time on the East Coast when I left Raleigh, I
could land in Chicago and 2 days later my phone will still have East Coast
time, unless I physically reboot it. And vice versa going the other way.

I don't know if it's a reflection of the same problem(s) talked about in this
article or not, but I know it's incredibly annoying.

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justincormack
In the UK most 3G networks do not give out the time. In Belgium they seem to.

Why NTP is not running as standard I have no idea. You have to root your phone
to run it.

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AceJohnny2
GPS is also a source of time.

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mikeash
Although not a great source of time zone info unless you have a big database
to back it all up.

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thechut
Title is total link bait. Article says 3.5% of Android phones clocks are off
by 15s and that in some cases there are time zone edge cases causing it to be
off by an hour. This is not what the title conveys.

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JamesCRR
Actually 3.5% of android clocks ARE out by one hour or more... the 15s bug
effects some phones, but the problem of being more than an hour out is very
general and does effect 3.5% of phones - sorry if that's not clear!

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mikeklaas
This was an issue for our app. We went SSL-only for our API, which
unfortunately fails with a cryptic error message if the clock is off. We
eventually messages this to the user ("Sorry, Zite is broken, please reset
your clock"), but there's no way to know how many users actually went and
fixed it and returned to the app.

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hakonber
The Google Play Store app on Android is also affected by this. It'll just show
a generic "unable to connect" message if your clock is too far off, which I
assume is related to the same SSL problem.

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smackfu
>The time displayed to the user will seem correct

This gets into fuzzy definitions of "correct" here. If the phone is showing
the right local time, but internally has the wrong UTC time, does it matter?

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naz
Yes. With many two-factor authenticator applications, your codes won't work if
your clock is wrong.

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CanSpice
Two-factor authenticator applications should be using UTC, and not the display
time. I think that's what the parent comment's point was.

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smackfu
Right, but these phones have the wrong UTC, if I understand correctly. That's
why they are in the write-up. Wrong local/display time is pretty hard to
detect, unless you have coordinate data.

Given that, two factor where the second factor is a local authenticator
program is not exactly a common thing.

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dawilster
It's Candy Crush's fault.

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dubfan
My old phone (LG Thrill) had a bug where the clock would simply stop syncing
for some unknown reason. It could be hours out of date at any given time. The
only way to resolve this was to restart the phone. Of course, it was never
fixed before LG abandoned the phone. There were other very serious problems
with that phone, and the whole experience put me off Android.

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vardump
In our experience, same applies to also iPhones, but the offsets tend to be
time zone granularity. And a lot of users, especially from Asia, seem to use a
U.S. VPN or a proxy of some sort. Their devices still have +8 hours or so time
zone and an asian carrier name.

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mikecane
Does this account for what I saw in a store? The Galaxy Note 8.0's clock
widget didn't have the same time as the clock in the upper right corner. Or is
this a widget issue?

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Zikes
That sounds like a widget issue. Unless you saw the clock widget change times,
it most likely froze up.

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r00fus
Does this issue affect the iPhone? If not, why not?

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ecnahc515
Simple, its an Android problem.

