[tz] Cellphone tz updates often not happening in Israel

[Guy Harris]

On Sep 23, 2013, at 3:55 PM, Richard Johnson <rjohnson+tz at ucar.edu> wrote:

> Most Android 2 and 3 devices are likely to have tzdata2010k.  90%+ of
> Android devices are non-upgradeable (for various reasons including:
> carriers will not provide upgrades, hardware is too weak to support new
> versions, etc.), so they have security vulnerabilities on top of any
> outdated TZ info.

Yeah, those were the reasons I was thinking of for the "if you can't update to an OS version with an updated version of the tzdb;" case.

For OS X, only the "hardware is deemed too weak to support new versions" reason applies; I had the impression that updates came from the carrier for Android, and that might also get in the way of updating.

> I'm aware that ClockSync and similar Android apps have an optional
> tzdata2013e library or the like, each for their own private use.
> Installing their tzdata2013e does not necessarily affect the system time
> zone options.  This suggests any provision for external overrides of
> bundled tzdata is not system-wide on Android 2, 3, or 4.

I.e., that if there were a system-wide way of doing that, those apps would have to duplicate it?  By "external override" I was thinking of something where, for example, some APIs would, at least if converting the *current* date/time, get the offset from both the tzdb and the carrier and, if they disagreed, discard the tzdb value and use the carrier's value instead.