Photo by kodomut on Flickr. Some rights reserved
The iPhone DST bug is making its way around the world and has hit the US - where people found that they slept through for an hour after the end of daylight savings time there on Sunday morning.
Contrary to my mistaken impression, Apple did not rollout the iOS 4.2 update which fixes the bug - meaning that many people slept through if they had set a repeating alarm to wake them on Monday. (And of course expressed their annoyance on Twitter.)
Apple's support document about the problem remains curiously imprecise about the cause, while noting that "In some regions, shortly before or after the daylight saving time (DST) change, repeating alarms created in the Clock app may work incorrectly." We don't know which regions it would work correctly in: everywhere from New Zealand to, so far, Hawaii has been affected. If anyone knows of anywhere else that hasn't been affected by this bug, do tell.
The bug seems to be caused by the repeating alarms being tied to the local time at creation rather than the local time at use. It also seems to have been introduced with Apple's iOS 4.x update.
And just to remind you of the solution: "To resolve this behavior for existing alarms, set the repeat interval to Never. You will need to reset these alarms for each day you need them. After November 7th, 2010, you can set your alarms to repeat again." Except that you need to delete the alarms and recreate them. Not ideal. We'll have to wonder what things are going to be like in iOS's second leap year, 2012, by which time we'll probably be on iOS 5.x. Things didn't go well for the Zune then. Perhaps Apple can top it.
