[The Mullet of G]

So have any of you fell foul of the hilariously bad alarm bug? It would seem that iOS 4.1 has some issues with Daylight Savings Time which causes recurring alarms to go off an hour late. Hardly the sort of thing that will breed confidence in the enterprise sector.

Apple already knew about the bug and acknowledged the error when the clocks changed in Australia, but made no attempt to issue a fix to stop the same thing happening elsewhere. We must now wait for 4.2 to be released before this issue is fixed.

I would conclude that this pokes a huge hole in Apples method of updating, rather than simply issue a patch for the bug, we have to instead wait for a new OS version to be released. This is all very slow and cumbersome, why can't they simply push a fix onto devices or offer one via Itunes/Appstore?

[The Mullet of G]

I'd also like to add the SMS tone bug to this thread, could be an offshoot of the proximity sensor bug but I'm not sure yet. Basically it happens when you receive an sms during a phonecall, instead of giving a subtle beep or the like it blasts the sms tone at full volume while the phone is right next to your ear, not a pleasant experience. All of my iPhone 4 owning buddies also report the same issue, all on 4.1.

[Ben]

Quite hilarious this bug, Apple just doesn't get timezones. Makes them look rather foolish.

Normally a patch would be released but as you know 4.2 is about to come out and it's a major update to bring the iPad inline with everything else. Trying to squeeze a patch in as well could make things worse; so they're between a rock and a hard place.

Not noticed the SMS tone thing but it sounds entirely plausible.

Still, 4.2 soon - I'm sure that'll give us plenty of new niggles to moan about.

[The Mullet of G]

Yeah it is a bit of a schoolboy error it has to be said.

I understand not releasing 4.1.1 or something along those lines as 4.2 is due, but that right there is my issue, can't they simply patch the problem without the need to download and update the entire OS? I think its something Apple need to look at, as the days of flashing your entire OS should be long gone.

The SMS bug is the worst, I almost needed an underwear change the first time it happened, I'll be shocked if this hasn't lead to someone dropping their iPhone 4 as a result. I suspect this bug could be a result of the proximity sensor fix or original issue that caused it, but I haven't bothered to investigate so this is merely speculation.

Yup, I'm hearing 4.2 should be out pretty soon but not before we get another iTunes update? :)

[DBMandrake]

While I don't want to defend Apple here (because they have indeed screwed up) "simply patching the problem" isn't always as easy as it sounds when you take regression testing into account, otherwise they could just as easily break something else in the process. With tens of millions of iOS devices out there, and no easy or officially sanctioned downgrade mechanism (another fault of Apple's) screwing up something else with a rushed fix would give them more of a black eye than being a bit slow fixing the original problem, which lets face it, does have an easy workaround.

The fix was in one of the early betas of 4.2 nearly a month ago, so in that sense it was acknowledged and "fixed" relatively quickly - what remained was for them to regression test it thoroughly. That, and the lock screen security flaw were probably slated to be fixed in an interim 4.1.1 release but for whatever reason they've both been held back for 4.2, perhaps they decided against pushing out two updates within a week or two of each other.

We don't know how complex the problem is either - it's easy to assume it's just a bug in the clock app, but I don't think that's the case. As far as I know, (from poking around jailbroken devices) alarms and calendar alerts in iOS rely on scheduling services in the core unix OS - the clock app doesn't run in the background - it's just a GUI for setting alarms, and it schedules events with the system event scheduler - which I believe is based on cron or a very similar unix level daemon.

The problem is what to do with recurring alarms (or recurring calendar event reminders, which are also affected) which cross a summer/winter time zone change boundary - unlike Windows, which changes the hardware clock with daylight savings shifts, (thus keeping the hardware clock in step with "local" time) iOS and Mac OS X follow the Unix tradition of keeping the hardware clock at UTC regardless of what time zone you're in, and whether you're in summer or winter time.

A time zone and summer/winter correction is applied to UTC read from the clock on the fly by the OS when an app asks for the time. (Same as what happens in the C lib in other Unix systems) If we assume that the event scheduler runs on the hardware time stored in UTC then after summer/winter time changes, and you set an alarm to go off after the change - the scheduler needs to look ahead, realise "ah, the time zone will change before then" and make a correction, I guess the bug is that it doesn't do this, or doesn't do it correctly.

Strange that it's reared it's head in 4.x though - previous iOS versions have always dealt with time zone changes for alarms perfectly - I've been using mine as an alarm clock for years now. They must have changed something fundamental in the event scheduler and not tested it properly in 4.0.

An interesting thing I noticed which I haven't seen reported anywhere, is that as well as recurring alarms being delayed by an hour after going to winter time, I found that recurring calendar events with reminders are going off an hour earlier. I have a couple of fortnightly recurring calendar events with reminders to remind me to put the rubbish out, and which bin it is (sad I know) and after the change over it woke me up an hour early....Grrr

Although alarm clocks worked across summer/winter time changes in 3.x and earlier, I've always had problems with calendar events not syncing the time correctly in summer when I lived in New Zealand - the normal winter time zone there is +12 UTC but in summer it becomes +13 UTC, and you would be surprised how many operating systems and apps cannot correctly handle a time zone offset of more than +/- 12 hours. Every summer my calendar events synced from Microsoft exchange would be one hour out, no matter what I did...I wonder if they'll fix that too...

Yet another strange oddity - the night before last the date and time on my 3GS went back by 3 days and 3 hours, something that I've never had happen on any iOS device before in all the years I've had them, and the other iOS devices in the house did not do this. Software bug ? Hardware glitch ? Who knows, but this combined with the daylight savings bug has really shaken my faith in the iPhone as a reliable alarm clock...

[The Mullet of G]

I forgot to mention the lock screen security flaw, which someone kindly demonstrated on my iPhone a week or two ago much to my surprise. I would agree that I don't have much faith in the iPhone as a reliable alarm clock.

4.2 was meant to fix these issues, but it has been delayed due to it also having show stopping bugs, mainly with the wifi. This doesn't bode well for Apple, as it isn't exactly inspiring confidence or adding credibility to their "it just works" slogan.

[DBMandrake]

Yet another strange oddity - the night before last the date and time on my 3GS went back by 3 days and 3 hours, something that I've never had happen on any iOS device before in all the years I've had them, and the other iOS devices in the house did not do this. Software bug ? Hardware glitch ? Who knows, but this combined with the daylight savings bug has really shaken my faith in the iPhone as a reliable alarm clock...

Well it looks like I wasn't the only person to experience a mysterious 3 day time jump, there are dozens of posts on the Apple forum about the exact same problem - apparently only affecting the 3GS:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2642957&start=0&tstart=0

I'm not sure whether other people with 3GS's are still having this problem or not, as I've already updated mine to the 4.2GM which probably has a fix for this issue...(hopefully....it's been ok anyway)


I forgot to mention the lock screen security flaw, which someone kindly demonstrated on my iPhone a week or two ago much to my surprise. I would agree that I don't have much faith in the iPhone as a reliable alarm clock.

Yep, the lock screen flaw has been known for about 3 weeks now, it made the rounds of the Apple rumour/news sites and I verified it on my own phone. I haven't tried to test it in 4.2 but I believe it's fixed. It's a bit slack of Apple not to push out a 4.1.1 promptly to address this issue, I bet corporate environments with iPhone's are fuming about this issue...at worst the alarm bug might make you an hour late for work, but the lock screen bug can reveal commercially sensitive information. (like the contact list, and even emails)



4.2 was meant to fix these issues, but it has been delayed due to it also having show stopping bugs, mainly with the wifi. This doesn't bode well for Apple, as it isn't exactly inspiring confidence or adding credibility to their "it just works" slogan.

I think part of the problem they're running into is that iOS is beginning to get too big and complex under the hood. iPhone OS 1.x was extremely simple and lean by comparison to iOS 4.x and didn't support anything except the small built in set of apps, which compared to iOS 4.x were also quite limited in their functionality. Sure, there were a lot of bugs to begin with as cramming OS X into a phone was a brand new endeavour, but by the end of the 1.x series it was pretty lean and stable.

Now it's reaching the point where whilst I wouldn't call it "bloated", it's definitely becoming very complex under the hood with a lot of inter-dependencies and potential for problems. Apple are well known for using relatively small development teams (I wouldn't be surprised if the core iOS team were only a dozen or so people) and I think the project is beginning to scale outside the size and scope that the current team can handle without making mistakes. (There have been some pretty fundamental, embarrassing mistakes made in the last year in iOS)

What they'll do to address this I don't know, because I can only see the situation getting worse as they try to cram more desktop OS functionality into iOS due to the iPad. (For example just adding print functionality brings in a whole new can of worms..)

[The Mullet of G]

The 3 day time jump thing is bizarre, I can kinda understand the daylight saving bug it sorta makes sense but a 3 day time jump makes no sense at all.

I was quite surprised by the lock screen flaw, I doubted it until I saw it with my own eyes. I suspected the daylight saving bug would have raised a few eyebrows in the enterprise sector, but agree that the lock screen flaw is a lot more serious.

I didn't have much dealings with iOS in its early days, but would totally agree with your observations based on what I have seen. Apple are definitely starting to show cracks under the burden of complexity that iOS now has, and if they don't get a handle on it quickly then its easy to see it becoming a bigger issue as iOS evolves. I would like to think that Apple are savvy enough to tackle this before it gets out of hand though, but not before a few more schoolboy errors have been made I fear.