Changing timezones causes Apple Health weirdness

[bsoule]

Desiderata

Beta Give feedback

1. Get a sense of how rare this is / does it happen every time anyone changes timezone?

Replicata

1. Have an Apple-Health-integrated mileage goal
2. Physically move your body & phone from Eastern time to Central time

Expectata

For my goals to not be affected by this.

Resultata

Apple Health changed a bunch of past data values and sent simultaneous updates to Beeminder all at once causing surprise derails because everything was stepping on everything else's toes.

Nota Nebulosa

I'm not realistically sure that there's anything we could do about this? But maybe those updates are marked with some different kind of category and we could ... ? react differently? I didn't check if the Beeminder timezone changed in this case. Anyhow, it was kind of odd because here are the changes that Apple made:

2021-05-24 2.30 => 8.76
2021-05-25 8.76 => 1.22
2021-05-26 1.22 => 4.04
2021-05-27 4.04 => 4.75
2021-05-28 4.75 => 4.56
2021-05-29 4.56 => 0.81

It changed the dates on all of the data .. which seems weird. Why would it change the entire mileage count by a day because the user's timezone moved by an hour? Anyway, the fact that it seems weird to me is probably irrelevant.

Cognata

• App claims not to know user's timezone #360
• App doesn't notice when you switch Beeminder timezone #507

Verbata: time zone hell, end-of-day cutoff for autodata, autodata maintenance, Apple Health integration,