iPhone DST bug makes alarms fail across Europe
Posted in Security, Web Development on November 1st, 2010 by Maurice Kindermann
Three weeks ago ZDNet reported that the iPhone DST (the clock / alarm) had a bug when switching between Daylight Savings and Standard time. The bug causes the alarm to go off 1 hour later than usual (as reported by many angry twitteries out there!). The bug was caused when the phone’s internal clock was changed (to the correct time), but the alarm time stayed the same.
Apple had acknowledged the bug after the problems in Australia and had promised a software update to fix things. Unfortunately that fix has not come in time and has left European iPhone owners in a bit of a mess. With the North American Daylight Savings switch due on the 7th of November, hopefully Apple can push out an update to stop this from happening again.
Interestingly enough deleting and re-adding the alarm will not fix the problem. If you have an alarm set for anything other than ‘every-day’, your alarm will go off one hour late. That means the bug will happen if your alarm is set to ‘Tuesday’, ‘weekends’, or ‘weekdays’ etc. Below are two methods to avoid the bug:
- Set your alarm to repeat every day (as stated above).
- Set the repeat to ‘never’, and you wont have any issues.
Make sure to test it out for yourself before you commit to an alarm for tomorrow morning!
