Sunday 4 March 2012

Incorrect time on received text messages

Ever since Feb 29 (coincidentally), my smartphone had suddenly begun showing weird behavior for received text messages. For instance, if I sent a message at 8pm and immediately got a reply, it would show up as 3pm. Aside from the inconvenience factor, for some phones this can be a problem if "conversation" views are used as replies and sent messages do not appear one after another.

Diagnosis:
It turns out that recently, my service provider had a cell that had its time zone programmed wrong and because my phone was set to automatically update date, time, and time zone from the cell phone company, it updated my phone's time zone to the wrong zone.

Solution:
A quick fix was to manually set my phone's time zone and stop it from automatically updating. This seemed to fix the problem.

Final Thoughts:
This post is not really a definitive solution for all causes of this problem. Rather, it is meant to talk about one possible cause of this problem (and a solution for that cause), just in case someone out there hadn't thought of this cause while trying to debug their own phone or debugging an app for texts.

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