Summer (Winter) Time Fun

[Ben Rubinstein]

Hi Pyyhtiä,

I don't have any technical suggestions for you.  But a non-tech suggestion and 
a point of information:

- suggestion: add a grace period.  Possibly display the information that your 
term ends today - but in practise give a 24-hour grace period when the app 
still works.  If the client renews, that still bases off the time it should 
have been renewed by (i.e. they don't get an extra day free as a reward for 
being late, they just got to pay for it a day later); if they don't renew, 
they weren't going to anyway, they got one extra day.  Better that the people 
who weren't going to renew got a free day, than that your good customers were 
inconvenienced by something that might easily have been a glitch on your end, 
for example.

- information: actually the US used to "spring forward" a week or so after 
most of Europe, but a few years ago they changed their timetable, and they now 
do it several weeks before us.  So your US customers have already survived 
this pain point.   (Unlike several of my clients, since I repeatedly messed up 
the timing of conference calls!)

Ben


On 31/03/2015 13:20, Pyyhtiä Christer wrote:
> I wonder if anyone else has met this funny problem.  And possibly coded out a solution for it.
>
> In my app, the automatically renewing in-app subscription term ended today, at 14:30.  This expiry time was calculated in the app by just adding one month at the previous payment time (because Google, for example, is adding expiry time in their registry one day at a time, not for the period requested).
>
> Now, logging in at 14:31, there was not yet automatical renewal issued, as the time was pushed ahead by one hour.  So the app said, sorry, your subscription license is expired!  Obvously, when taking a coffee break, and retrying at 15:.31, it will work.  Now this is in Europe (Finland), but then there is US, where the summer / winter time switching is off by one week, I don't remember which way.  And the countries, where there isn't this time push/pull fun, the problem is at the point of time of moving into winter time.
>
> I guess the only way is to base everything on UTC, adding / substracting the internet date offset.  it is just getting a bit complex, as the app stores use milliSeconds as their base.
>
> Have fun!  I will have a cup of coffee.