Hey Android, why no love for UTC?

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=39099

by mikelabatt • 10 years ago

185 120 10 years ago

code.google.com

CiPHPerCoder• 10 years ago

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

cmrdporcupine3• 10 years ago

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.

incompatible• 10 years ago

Sad, and I suppose amusing. I'd prefer to use a spelling checker that accepted all widely-used variations, color as well as colour etc.

kbenson2• 10 years ago

Ah, but what does it suggest when trying to help out or autocorrect to the most likely word?

chambo622• 10 years ago

Do the Locale-related changes in Android N improve this?

jnky• 10 years ago

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.

wtbob2• 10 years 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!

userbinator• 10 years ago

Windows has been getting locale settings right for ages now.

That's because those settings were designed before the era of "simplify everything that could even slightly potentially confuse an idiot user" and have been retained from then. I wouldn't be so sure if the future Windows versions will still be as customisable, given that they've already removed things like the ability to change fonts and colours in the UI. It's almost a given that sooner or later someone will come across it, think "let's overhaul/refresh/'enhance the UX'", and turn it into a totally sleek and stylish but less functional version of what it used to be.

lake99• 10 years ago

I have my Android device set to use en-GB as its primary language for metric units, my spell checker is set to en-US, and my Google News is set to India.

What you want is already possible. However, I do wish the platform allowed a more direct customization of all LC_* stuff.

Windows has been getting locale settings right for ages now.

Do you mean Windows phone? If so, I'm impressed. If you meant Windows, the computer OS series, well, that would not be a fair comparison for Android. Linux already gets that right.

lwf2• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

On phones, 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.

TeMPOraL• 10 years ago

Then 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.

cmrdporcupine3• 10 years ago

In 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• 10 years ago

I 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• 10 years ago

Also ignored for many years by the Android team.

The old "closed wontfix (tooboring)" affair seems sadly common.

takno5• 10 years ago

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.

mikeash• 10 years ago

It 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• 10 years ago

Right, 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.

jontro• 10 years ago

Looks 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.

x1798DE2• 10 years ago

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.

takno5• 10 years ago

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.

niccaluim• 10 years ago

Every single person in aviation, for starters.

planteen• 10 years ago

And in space (as in spacecraft). To get GMT, I set my city to Reykjavik.

unclebucknasty2• 10 years ago

Technically, UTC isn't a time zone.

simonh2• 10 years ago

It's common usage to say or write UTC as a timezone when you mean UTC+0.

Artoemius3• 10 years ago

Anyone who had to deal with time zones at least once in their lifetime, provided that they have a perfectly natural habit of reading Wikipedia when they find something new to them.

guard-of-terra2• 10 years ago

Why not provide both GMT (whatever it means) and UTC for those who really want it? Doesn't have to be either-or.

rtkwe3• 10 years ago

No reason to have both. A UTC and a GMT clock will read the same time as far as I know.

simonh2• 10 years ago

Anybody who's been in the army.

ska2• 10 years ago

Short of the very rare case of being a bona-fide expert and up to date in an area "I'm not aware of..." is a deeply flawed input for design and implementation.

Distrust it implicitly.

takno5• 10 years ago

I'm not the designer. I'm just suggesting reasons why the designers of Android may have chosen the design they did rather than the design the issue demands is the "correct" way

Animats• 10 years ago

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

chrisseaton• 10 years ago

Z, for Zulu

I think it might be the other way around.

Terr_2• 10 years ago

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>

syncsynchalt• 10 years ago

A 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

staplung• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

atemerev• 10 years ago

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

the_mitsuhiko• 10 years ago

For years there was no Yekaterinburg zone in the clock. No alternative. But you could select it in the system settings. Wtf Google.

Artoemius3• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

Artoemius3• 10 years ago

The main problem is not the bug itself, but the fact that it's not fixed for so many years.

jleahy• 10 years ago

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.

Oletros• 10 years ago

From a developer's point of view, Android is known to be a mess.

Source for this?

khedoros• 10 years ago

Not being an Android dev myself, these are some complaints I've heard: There are a ton of resolutions, aspect ratios, and screen sizes. There are a lot of GPU vendors. Driver quality, performance of specific features, little tricks to even use specific features, etc, vary between each of those vendors, and your program should support as many as possible. Different phones have different input methods and peripheral hardware (sensors, notification lights, vibration motors, 3D screens, slide-out keyboards, etc), and trends in the market shift over time.

Compared to Apple, there's a lot of variability in devices, and that may be what they were referring to.

realusername• 10 years ago

I hope it has improved since last time I've worked with it (3 years maybe now ?). But on top of my head this were the problems I faced (probably not up do date now, I hope it's much better now):

- The emulator was slow as hell

- Impossible to resize the emulator window dynamically so testing is really slow and painful

- Bugs with manufacturer roms & drivers (hello Samsung !) So you have to test with a lot of devices without guarantee it will work

- you have to copy all the fields yourself when your device pass in portrait mode since everything is being erased (even text fields)

- You need to create some strange XML for just about everything, nothing really works by default.

- No package manager for the libraries, you have to copy some random .jar here and there

- Really poor API. No usable date picker (I'm discarding the default one here), no file picker, no contact manager you can inherit from in built-in, you had to reimplement everything yourself, even a button with an image on it you had to do it yourself.

- Poor consistency in the XML names, it was difficult to guess what meant what.

- The documentation was also hard to browse

- The permission system is close to broken (they are working on that at the moment apparently).

- If your APK is too large, APK expansions (can't remember the exact name now) API's were borderline broken and buggy.

- SD card management was a mess.

- Everything related to layout was difficult to get it right and nothing would ever resize right unless you put a lot of effort into it (the opposite of the web on this).

- Android browser was close to unusable but now that I've checked a recent version, it seems they solved that.

chris_wot• 10 years ago

Damn, this was lodged in 2012!

This seems like a complete no-brainer.

guelo• 10 years ago

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...

moviuro• 10 years ago

Whoa, 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=...

paulojreis2• 10 years ago

I remember 7 years ago following this one: 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.

tremon2• 10 years ago

I'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.

theandrewbailey2• 10 years ago

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

on_and_off• 10 years ago

I have been using the stock android alarm clock for a couple of years (and Timely before that), both work like a charm.

I would not be too surprised if they were to fail someday (IIRC it happened multiple times with the iOS clock app), software & time are both complicated..

dvcrn• 10 years ago

I'm not sure how Android development works but as a open source project, how come noone implemented simple things like "Add setting to disable all Heads-Up (POP UP) Notifications" yet? Is it the Android team rejecting patches or just lack of interest in getting involved?

Raticide• 10 years ago

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

jschwartzi• 10 years ago

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.

swiley2• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

unlinker• 10 years ago

There are chances your changes will be accepted into CM.

swiley2• 10 years ago

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

lostcolony2• 10 years ago

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.

hemflit• 10 years ago

Without trying to diminish the problem, I'll mention that Google Calendar does support the Iceland time zone, which happens to be equal to UTC.

takno5• 10 years ago

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

lostcolony2• 10 years ago

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.

motoboi2• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

motoboi2• 10 years ago

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. ;(

Hey Android, why no love for UTC?

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