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Comment by takno | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

I want advocating switching the main time zone selector over to a text box that says, "Enter a valid POSIX time zone string", I was suggesting that at the bottom of the list of selectable time zones (which you only reach generally if you turn off automatic time zone selection) there be a button that says, "choose a fixed offset". Seems like a no brainer.

Every single person in aviation, for starters.

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

And space as in astronomy.

Or any global project where people in different countries have to coordinate times for events.

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.

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

It's not in any way about design, it's about having one more option in an already long long combo box.

My point was, absent doing real work to find out the "right" answer for a range of users, what you or I are aware of is so full of selection bias as to be basically useless to generalize from. It's also an incredibly common failure mode, because you already "know" the answer.

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.

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.

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

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

The reason to have both is that people will search for one or the other based on their habits, and the cost is so, so low to having both.

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.

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.

> 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.

Technically, UTC isn't a time zone.

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

Yeah, I was agreeing with the parent in saying that adding a non-timezone to the timezone selection is not a usability enhancement.

Anybody who's been in the army.

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