alt Hacker NewsIt's hard to keep a phone's clock closely synchronized because they experience a lot of temperature swings, going between pockets and hands and open air and sometimes in direct sun, and the processor goes between idle and 100% as well.
Once you get to internationa phones, you'll have places where the phone does not include all timezones and specifically is missing the actual local timezone, so automatic sync is typically disabled so that the time can be set so that the displayed time matches local time... even if that means the system time is not correct.
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vel0city • yesterday at 5:23 AM
Don't a lot of cellular networks rely on highly synchronized clocks to properly handle TDMA-style transmissions? Shouldn't they be very in sync with the towers' times?
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It’s not that hard. You would not expect 5 sec drift on phones that can sync time on the web at least once a day or once a week. A basic quartz crystal can keep time to within seconds per month of drift. High quality phones can do the same or better. Also the phone should keep track of system time as epoch time, and convert to local.