[tz] Cellphone tz updates often not happening in Israel

[Richard Johnson]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 03:33:43PM -0700, Guy Harris wrote:
> On Sep 23, 2013, at 1:32 PM, "L. David Baron" <dbaron at dbaron.org> wrote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NITZ doesn't have information on
> > Israeli carriers, but it also suggests that there are substantial
> > numbers of mobile networks that don't provide timezone information.
> 
> That article mentions Android and iOS - perhaps I should look a bit more at Bionic and Darwin to see if they has any provision for external overrides of the tzdb information.  (Or perhaps Android has two separate chunks of code that handle time zone, and some other chunk does that; as I remember, OS X shares the tzdb between the tzcode in libSystem and some high-level (probably non-open-source) frameworks, so I suspect iOS does the same, and those high-level frameworks may support those external overrides.)

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outdated TZ info.

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.

Analysis of AOSP releases themselves will trump that speculation, of
course.


Richard