If a iPhone user has disabled "Set Automatically" for time zones, is it still possible to find the current local one?

Question

The scenario is a iPhone user who doesn't want the time to automatically update when he travels abroad and thus has disabled the system setting "Set Automatically" for time zones, leading to [NSTimeZone systemTimeZone] not updating for his new location.

As a developer, can I still find out the current local time and time zone for the (possibly new) country the device is in?

Answer 1

No. Not without some work anyway, and maybe not with some work.

If the user has disabled auto time zone setting, the only time zone you get to know about is the one that they've told their phone to use. You don't get to bypass their preferences on that. Unfortunately you also don't get to find out if they've done that. All you get is a time zone, but why that's current is not something you can answer.

If you're determined, you might try using Core Location to get their latitude and longitude, and work out a time zone from that. Doing that reliably may be a challenge-- the official IANA time zone database includes lat/long, but only at one location within each time zone. There are services like AskGeo that claim to solve this problem (they might be fantastic, I haven't tried them). But that obviously requires a network connection, and people traveling to other countries are probably less likely than average to have mobile data access.