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Hey Android, why no love for UTC?
- CiPHPerCoder 10y agoIf you ever want a crushing sense of "this project is totally mismanaged", just read its issue tracker.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoSad. 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.
- incompatible 10y agoSad, and I suppose amusing. I'd prefer to use a spelling checker that accepted all widely-used variations, color as well as colour etc.
- kbenson 10y agoAh, but what does it suggest when trying to help out or autocorrect to the most likely word?
- 8note 10y agosince they're watching me, they should suggest the version that I use the most frequently
- kbenson 10y agoOh, they should. Or preferably they should let you choose that specifically. I was responding towards the idea that they should include all variations when suggesting, not just what they see as your local variation.
- chambo622 10y agoDo the Locale-related changes in Android N improve this?
- jnky 10y agoOn 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 10y ago> 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 10y agoeven outside of America some folks prefer decimetres over centimetres! ? Isn't a decimetre a metric measurement?
- lwf 10y agoYes, and I'm guessing gp was suggesting that I might want my units in dm rather than cm.
- ma2rten 10y agoeven outside of America some folks prefer decimetres over centimetres! But the US uses feet and inches.
- wtbob 10y agoYes, and in regions outside of America there are folks who prefer to see lengths in decimetres and there are folks who prefer to see lengths in centimetres. Sure, it's easy to convert by sliding a decimal point, but they want to see the order of magnitude they're used to.
- lwf 10y ago> for many apps That's the app developer's fault. They thought they were being smart by saying "oh, if you're in en_GB, lets give you Yelp.co.uk by default". And yeah, sure, that works for most users. On the other hand, I don't think its fair to fault app developers for that, since there isn't otherwise a way to query the OS for "what country is this user in?" without asking for (and getting) full-precision location access.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoOn phones, http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/TelephonyManager.html#getSimCountryIso() http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/Tel... is probably a better estimate of the user's home country and getNetworkCountryIso() is a good estimate of the user's current country. The fact that my Android phone doesn't have en_CA as a locale option (maybe because they're too cheap to localize the system apps for Canadians, who mix British and American spellings) means that anybody who tries to get the country from the locale region code won't recognize Canadians with this phone.
- cheriot 10y agoThanks, assuming that doesn't require an extra permission, I'm going to use it this week!
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThen simply ask them. The whole idea of an app automatically tracking your location and localizing the content without the ability to pin your location is frankly idiotic. It's like whoever comes up with that great plan doesn't know people travel. Websites are especially guilty of that.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoIn this case the app developer is Google (News&Weather and navigation). So there's that. And the stubbornness in refusing to add en_CA is confusing. How long could it take? At the risk of talking ill about my own employer (Android is a different team which I have no connection to tho) it seems rather culturally insensitive. I'd put the change together myself if I knew anything about it. I should note that this is in stock Android on a Nexus. Motorola and others ship their Android with an en-CA locale.
- windsurfer 10y agoI have an Android Priv and it has the option for "English (Canada)" under "language & input", as well as "English (Canada)" for both keyboard inputs. The spell checker is set to "Use system language". Android version 5.1.1
- anonymousab 10y ago>Also ignored for many years by the Android team. The old "closed wontfix (tooboring)" affair seems sadly common.
- takno 10y agoI'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.
- mikeash 10y agoIt sounds like this is more than just a request for a terminology change. If I'm reading it right, Android's notion of GMT is that it's British time, with a Daylight Saving Time offset in the summer.
- ytjohn 10y agoRight, Britian uses GMT a portion of the year, and then switches to BST (British Summer Time) during the summer. BST is GMT+1. Android uses GMT and when summer comes around, Android's representation of GMT becomes GMT+1.
- dingaling 10y ago> Britian uses GMT a portion of the year, For that period of the year we actually use a 0-hour timezone over UT1 GMT simply doesn't exist any more. The two maintained timebases are UTC and TAI.
- jontro 10y agoLooks like people cannot set their time zone to UTC. Depending on the device there might not be an UTC equivalent time zone to choose from either, like Reykjavik may not be available on all devices.
- x1798DE 10y agoThe 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.
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- Animats 10y agoThey could call it Z, for Zulu, as the military does.
- chrisseaton 10y ago> Z, for Zulu I think it might be the other way around.
- Terr_ 10y agoRight: 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 10y agoI thought "Zulu" was just the common phonetic code for "Z", like Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, etc.
- Terr_ 10y agoYes, I believe his joke/point is about the order of causation: The letter came first, and the name followed, rather than the letter being an abbreviation of the name.
- theandrewbailey 10y agoFor reference, the entire list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#Code_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#Code_wo...
- syncsynchalt 10y agoA bit of trivia: there are actually letters assigned to all 24 hourly offsets, Z (Zulu) is only the most well known / useful. http://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/military http://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/military
- staplung 10y agoLast 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 10y agoAt least in latest iOS, UTC is an option in the World Clock tab. It's also an option for system time zone.
- atemerev 10y agoIt wasn't this way a few releases ago. I remember setting up Liberia time zone when I wanted UTC.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoFor years there was no Yekaterinburg zone in the clock. No alternative. But you could select it in the system settings. Wtf Google.
- Artoemius 10y agoThanks 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 10y agoPlease 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.
- Artoemius 10y agoThe main problem is not the bug itself, but the fact that it's not fixed for so many years.
- jleahy 10y agoMaybe 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 10y agoReykjavik 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
- Oletros 10y ago> From a developer's point of view, Android is known to be a mess. Source for this?
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- chris_wot 10y agoDamn, this was lodged in 2012! This seems like a complete no-brainer.
- guelo 10y agoThis 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=&colspec=ID%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars%20Reporter%20Opened&sort=-stars&num=100&start=0 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&colsp...
- moviuro 10y agoWhoa, EAP-SIM is the top one and... is 6 years old O_O My Alcatel Pixi could do that but not my both Nexuses (4 & 5x), this is really a shame :'( [1] Thanks for pointing at the list ;) [1] http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5048&idPhone2=7556&idPhone3=6933 http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5048&idPhone2=...
- paulojreis 10y agoI 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.
- tremon 10y agoI'm using Fake Dawn as my alarm app. Hasn't failed me once. But I do use the Android alarm clock occasionally on non-working days, and I've slept through that more than once. It hadn't occurred to me yet that something basic as a timer alarm could be broken.
- paulojreis 10y agoOh, great, so it still happens? I really found the "obsolete" status on the issue rather strange, but (as I'm not using Android anymore) it was really just a suspicion. If it happens to you, maybe you could create a new issue on the tracker, stating that 1109 isn't really obsolete - it still happens.
- Raticide 10y agoBut do you know how much work that would be? It could take them multiple minutes to implement!
- jschwartzi 10y agoAnd 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.
- swiley 10y agoThere 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 10y agoIt'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.
- lostcolony 10y agoThis 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.
- hemflit 10y agoWithout trying to diminish the problem, I'll mention that Google Calendar does support the Iceland time zone, which happens to be equal to UTC.
- takno 10y agoI'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 10y agoYou 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.
- motoboi 10y agoI 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 10y agoTurn off Data and let the phone connect to a local cell network, as soon as it connects it'll update the time.
- motoboi 10y agoI 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_ 10y agoIt 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).