New Apple iOS 8 crisis creates chaos for users

I’m a big fan of iOS 8. It has finally begun to open up the Apple ecosystem with better third party app integration, replaceable keyboards and potential game changing hubs like HealthKit and Pay. But it is also the buggiest release in iOS history and that doesn’t look set to be changing anytime soon.

Following WiFi, battery drain and Bluetooth problems, I have been alerted by reader Jarrett Gorin to a huge Apple Support Communities thread which spans four months, has nearly 600 replies and well over 200,000 views. The topic? The “GMT Bug”.

Missed Meetings

Gorin explains: “The bug causes any appointment created on an iOS device to acquire the time zone setting of the clock on the server where the user’s calendar account resides, and then all appointments are transposed to that time zone (usually GMT…most people call this the “GMT Bug” as a result). It is widespread and extremely annoying and causes many people to miss appointments and to resort to using 3rd party calendar apps.”

In short: calendar events entered on one iOS device incorrectly sync changing their time and time zone. Primarily it is affecting Microsoft Exchange and Google calendars linked to the iOS calendar.

Initially Apple denied the issue with many contributors to the support thread saying they received the message that “This is expected behavior with iOS 8”, but four months on Apple has admitted to the problem.

39 pages into the Support Communities thread user Thelssa says “after working my way up to a supervisor [at Apple support] last night I was told their engineers are working on a solution, but don’t have a time frame for a fix.”

Similarly Aaron Cohoon on the AppRiver blog was told: “Apple is aware of this and [it’s] currently being worked on.”

I have also reached out to Apple for further comment, but have yet to receive a reply. I will update this post when I do.

So what to do until a fix appears?

Solutions

For many of those affected switching calendar has proved the easiest answer with the excellent Sunrise app proving popular. Meanwhile Google will finally launch an official Calendar app for iOS in the next few weeks and it appears the timing couldn’t be better.

As for a more permanent fix, hopes are high for iOS 8.1.3 which first leaked in December and is expected to be released in the next few weeks. iOS 8.2 is also on the horizon and will debut ahead of the Apple Watch launch which is due in February/March.

To date there have been six versions of iOS 8 since September: iOS 8, iOS 8.0.1, iOS 8.0.2, iOS 8.1, iOS 8.1.1 and iOS 8.1.2. So perhaps for those hit by the GMT Bug, it will be seventh time lucky.

Article Source: New Apple iOS 8 crisis creates chaos for users