Better double check your Apple iPhone’s clock immediately upon waking tomorrow morning

As long as you have the “Set Automatically” setting on your Apple iPhone toggled on, you should be able to go to sleep comfortable with the knowledge that the time change is being handled by your phone without having to remember to move the clock ahead by one hour. You should double check how you have the device set by going to Settings > General > Date & Time. Look for  “Set Automatically” and make sure that it is toggled on.

However, as many of you long time PhoneArena readers might recall, leaving Daylight Saving Time up to iOS to handle is not always the smartest thing to do. It has almost become a tradition that the iPhone will screw-up the adjustment to DST. For example, in 2012 the iPhone clock not only failed to move ahead one hour, it actually was set back an hour by mistake. That was a two-hour screw up and certainly resulted in appointments being missed on that day. To add insult to injury, when asking Siri when Daylight Saving Time was supposed to begin that year, users were given an incorrect date that was four days early. And here’s the punchline. The iPhone did move the clock ahead one hour for users in Arizona. However, that is one of two states that does not support the practice (Hawaii is the other).

After having issues with DST again in 2019, last year the time change was handled correctly. Hopefully this will happen again this year. The good news is that even Siri knows the correct date this year, although there are glaring differences between the far superior response from Google Assistant. The latter’s response to the question “when does daylight saving time start this year?” includes the actual time (2 am) when the clock is moved ahead one hour, and the date and time when the clock is moved back an hour later this year.