Android app thinks "today" is ... tomorrow

Bugabee
1

This seems different enough to Breaks page default dates off-by-one that I’m starting a new thread:

I frequently use the manual-entry UI in the Android app. Some time in the last few weeks or months, I noticed that the date field had started defaulting to tomorrow’s date. It used to default to today, as one would expect.

Today I noticed something worse.

  1. In the manual entry UI, tap on the date to open the Android-y date picker.
  2. Tap on the word “Today”.
  3. The date picker closes, but the date is set to tomorrow.

If I directly tap on a date in the picker, then that’s the date I get, which is expected. The date picker also highlights today’s date specially, as expected. So it seems like when the app asks for “today” it interprets the result incorrectly. If that’s how the default is chosen, then maybe it’s the same bug manifesting in two ways.

EDIT Since it probably matters, I’m in EET / UTC+2 on this crisp January morning.

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2

Hi! Sorry for the late reply, I was on holiday. I haven’t been able to replicate this on my version of the app in Android, so I just wanted to quickly check in about something: do you use custom deadlines on your goals? And is your Beeminder timezone correct?

This probably sounds obvious if you’ve dug around a bit, but it does catch some users by surprise: changing the deadline of a goal is essentially like changing the time midnight happens for that goal, or changing the timezone of the goal. The result is that when you have a custom deadline of 3pm, Beeminder thinks the next calendar day begins at 3pm.

The other thing is that Beeminder doesn’t change timezone automatically for you when you move between timezones (though it does for daylight savings) – you would need to change your timezone yourself. So that sometimes trips people up when it comes to dates as well.

It’d be good to rule those two cases out before we dig in further!

3

Yep, that explains it! I take it that beeminder only has a granularity of one day? Yes, I suppose so… that would explain it.

4

Yep, the X axis is in calendar days, with no part-days, so each increment on the X axis is a full day.

There’s a potential world where things are more granular, but it’s quite a ways off, I’d say! So in the meantime, Beeminder intuits what day it is for your goal, so you’ll enter data on the correct date for that goal based on its deadline rather than the actual calendar.

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