[tz] News article: Turkey’s plan to ignore daylight saving time has been foiled by smartphones

[Ken Rylander]

Hi,

Well, yes and no. As a software developer, who is comfortable in compiling timezone files for Android, you could probably make it work. I think you have to root your Android device though, otherwise the files are read-only (if I remember correctly, it's been a while since I tried). So it's far from an officially sanctioned method.

Pre-Android 4.3 the tzdata files was in a familiar format, but from 4.3 Android, devices have only 3 files in the tz directory (/system/usr/share/zoneinfo/):
zoneinfo.dat
zoneinfo.idx
zoneinfo.version

It's pretty easy to find the Java code to compile and produce these three files.

An additional complication (from version 4.4) is that some timezone info is kept in the ICU, and compiling the ICU libraries for older Android versions (e.g. 4.4-5), is far from trivial.

More info about the ICU/tz issue:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=169960
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33439071/update-android-timezone-data

But it's probably not an update procedure that your average-Joe would attempt...

Regards,

Ken Rylander | Solution Development and BI Manager - Digicel Pacific |
Digicel (Fiji) Ltd | P.O.Box 13811, Suva, Fiji | Ground Floor, Kadavu House, Victoria Parade, Suva, Fiji |
Mobile (679) 701 5353 | Fax (679) 334 3733  | ken.rylander at digicelgroup.com | www.digicelpacific.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul_Koning at Dell.com [mailto:Paul_Koning at Dell.com]
Sent: Sunday, 1 November 2015 1:36 AM
To: Ken Rylander <Ken.Rylander at digicelgroup.com>
Cc: goldsmit at apple.com; mj1856 at hotmail.com; enh at google.com; tz at iana.org
Subject: Re: [tz] News article: Turkey’s plan to ignore daylight saving time has been foiled by smartphones


> On Oct 27, 2015, at 8:15 PM, Ken Rylander <Ken.Rylander at digicelgroup.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> A mapping between Android version and tzdata version would also be very handy, since there is no way to update the tzdata version, without upgrading Android version.

Why not?  It's just files.  It may be that most vendors don't issue interim upgrades of the tzdata separate from the OS, but clearly they could if they wanted to.

        paul


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