iOS 8 Calendar on iPhone showing GMT times for new events.

Yes... You are 100% correct that you should not have to do any of this it is stupid and should not be your problem... (like subtracting 1 when you add 2+2 to get 5 on your calculator!) But at this point survival and functionality take precedent over what should be Apple's responsibility to fix.

As for the steps... I feel like an android person now... It will only fix once you have created an appointment so I will start with the edit step:

1. open the appointment

2. tap edit- the time will show in the GMT time

3. Change the time to what you actually want for your time zone (-8 hours for you... -5 hours for me)

4. toggle the all-day switch on then off

5. the appointment should have the correct time and time zone

6. tap done

7. pray....

I have deleted and added every account from my devices and tried all kinds of combinations and nothing has worked except this and it technically still didn't work because of the fact that I HAVE TO DO THESE STUPID 6 EXTRA STEPS EVERY TIME I PUT AN APPOINTMENT ON MY CALENDAR. The 7th step is something I do regardless... As my wife said to me yesterday- I can't believe you had to spend most of the day fixing a simple calendar... and it still is not working correctly. It has been nearly 30 hours and the appointments I have "toggled" are still GMT free.

Apple apparently is aware of the issue and working it. But with no haste or sense of urgency. A lot of folks are now diverting to iCloud which does not have this issue. So, all non-Apple services will have this GMT issue untill a fix is found and programmed. Once the fix is available, you will just need to disable your calendar function under settings and synchronize your device once. After that, re-enable your calendar function of the non-Apple service and synch again. All will then be fixed. Now let's hope Apple fixes this fast. I have already had several appointments messed up due to this issue................ :-(

This has maybe already been mentioned in this thread but a quicker alternative to selecting All Day and then clearing this and adjusting the time again is to select Repeat -> Every Day. Then wait a few moments for the event to synced with your Google calendar before doing Edit -> Repeat -> Never.

But this seems to provoke another bug in the iOS Calendar app; very often the app hangs when I click Add to save the entry then the app closing after a while.

Another point to note is that when creating a repeating event it saves the local time zone in the event. This may be the reason why it doesn't 'flip over' to GMT when changing the event to a single event.

I am facing this GMT time problem as well on my wife's iPhone 6 running ios 8.1.1.

When I create an event, it keeps showing up like this.

So, to get rid of this annoying GMT time being displayed, Edit the event you just created.

And touch the start time to change it. It will expand to let you change the date/time and below it you will see Time Zone.

Touch the Time Zone field and then type in your time zone.

Don't forget to fix the time to the correct time after you've corrected the Time Zone.

And voila! Your event should look normal again without the annoying GMT time.

I hope this works for all of you. Have a great day!

The only way to resolve this issue at this point is just to link your calendar to anything but Google. The problem is Google and nothing else. Worked fine when linked to my Yahoo account instead of my Google account. For now, it's an easy fix to avoid GMT annoyances on my calendar. I hope the next update will fix this bug.

@stearns003: I think this doesn't show up on Hotmail because that is a POP3 protocol whereas Google and Exchange are IMAP protocols which have far more complex data structures.

What is actually happening with this bug is described to perfection in this article on the AppRiver blog:

http://blog.appriver.com/2014/12/ios-8-calendar-events-display-dual-time-zones/

iOS isn't "removing" anything from appointments. Instead, iOS is "adding" something. Buggy code in iOS 8 is picking up the time setting of your physical server's clock and then converting your appointments into whatever time zone the server's clock is set to. That's why it does this on Exchange as well as Google even though Exchange does not manage time zones the same way as described for Google in your post above.

If you use a service like Yahoo! or Hotmail, which do not have nearly as robust a data structure as Exchange or Google, the buggy code won't pick up the server's time setting because that setting is not communicated to the Calendar application and therefore there is nothing for the buggy code to pick up.

The only people who can fix this issue are the engineers at Apple....and we have been informed Apple has confirmed this is a bug in iOS and is working on a solution. There is no magic bullet quick fix that somehow all of us have missed over the past few months of working on this. It's buggy source code in iOS. There is no "fix", just some very inconvenient work arounds.

I don't know if this helps, but I was having the same issue on my iOS8 iPhone 5, and what worked for me is to go into Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars>iCloud and to UNLINK Calendars from the iCloud. For some reason, everything went back to normal after that. Hope that helps some of you!

Well, if you can't or don't want to access Google Calendar from your device, you can remove the GMT in your iOS calendar by doing the following:

Create the appointment.

After GMT shows up, edit the appointment

Turn on and then turn off All-Day.

Correct the start and stop time (it will now be the GMT time but the time zone will be correct) to what you want

After doing this, the GMT will be gone from that appointment.

Once you get used to doing this for new appointments, it's really pretty easy although still a pain to have to do.

I have a solution of sorts: after I create an event and save it, I wait a few seconds and then edit the event, which by now will have changed to GMT time. I then change it back to the correct time (and date - remember to check the date, because it could be a day out), correct the am/pm if necessary, and replace the GMT time zone with my own time zone. I save the changes, and then the entry stays at the correct time and doesn't revert to GMT. It's a pain, but at least it works.

zak456 is correct about why creating an appointment in the Sunrise Calendar 3rd party app ends up in clean appointments syncing down to your iOS devices.

Unfortunately, I think that if you subsequently edit those appointments in the native iOS app you will see the GMT come right back. This is because the subscribed calendar sees an appointment that has been edited in the native iOS app as a "new" appointment "created" in the iOS app....complete with the buggy code that acquires the time zone setting from your server's time clock an then transposes your appointment to that time.

For example, I can create an appointment in Outlook on my PC and it will sync down to both of my iOS devices and there won't be any GMT thing on it nor will the time change to GMT. But if I edit the appointment on either device (say changing the time from 2:00 PM PST to 2:30 PM PST, the GMT thing will show up on the other iOS device as soon as it syncs over.

This explanation & info for a solution (temporary solution of course, until apple fixes this!) was the most helpful thing I read on this discussion. I put an iCloud calendar as my default and the whole issue with the GMT showing up was gone! Thank goodness!!! And like you said, events that were created during the time where GMT did show up, I simply went in and deleted them completely and re-entered them.

Thanks for the detailed info!

Actually, I am leaning towards Google being the source of this problem, and not Apple. When sniffing traffic between iOS device and Google Calendar while the events are synchronizing, I see that iOS is sending well-formed iCalendar request, which contains VTIMEZONE section and start & end times contain correct timezone: DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20150115T090000.

However, when Google sends event confirmation, it is omitting VTIMEZONE section and instead sends timezone info only in X-WR-TIMEZONE element, which is not a standard one (per iCalendar specifications), and dates are in UTC: DTSTART:20150115T080000Z.

iOS 8 EventKit and/or MobileCall app probably cannot recognize X-WR-TIMEZONE element, so the calendar event timezone gets updated to GMT (probably system default when no timezone info is present in server reply). Changing timezone back to Europe/Berlin (in this example) in EventKit Calendar.sqlitedb database fixes the problem for the event (GMT time will not be shown, and editing the event will show the correct timezone).

The fix for this needs to be either by Apple (add ability to parse non-standard X-WR-TIMEZONE element), or by Google (adhere to iCalendar standard when sending calendar replies/confirmations, and send timezone info in VTIMEZONE section).

nayo2002

nayo2002 wrote:

i found a way to fix it. Go to google calendar on Safari. It will ask you to upgrade to the latest version and set your time zone on the top of the web page. After you do both, the problem will go away. It seems like it's a Google Calendar update that cleared out your default time zone so it's showing GMT time on devices.

As a clarification. You need to go to the non-mobile version of Google calendar via iPad or a computer. This worked on all my devices. Can someone else check?

Sadly, this didn't work for us.

So, for now I'm trying Sunrise. So far so good.

I, too, am using Sunrise as an alternative until the Apple fixes the GMT problem. It is mostly good, with a few cons. Since Sunrise is often mentioned here as either a stop-gap or a replacement, I wanted to add a few notes about it, even though this is an Apple forum.

PRO

Sunrise does not have the GMT issue. It enters events only in my local time-zone (I haven't traveled with it), and events are editable without switching time zones. That Sunrise's engineers have solved that proves it is Apple's problem and not Google's.

CON

• You cannot set or change a calendar's color. Sunrise randomly sets a color for each calendar, with no connection to the existing color you've set at the source, and it is not editable. In my case, Sunrise set my Home calendar to light blue, my Work calendar to blue, and the current day highlight is a shade of blue between those two. Not good. (Also, the colors set in the iPhone app do not match those set in the iPad add.)
• You cannot move an event from one parent calendar to another. That is, if you create an event in a Google calendar, you can only move it to another Google calendar, NOT to an Exchange or iCloud calendar.

For me, the native iOS Calendar still wins in most categories, although I am actually using both to keep myself covered and to test which I like better in the long run. That may ultimately depend on who updates their app first and best.

You have to set the entry as repeating when creating it. It will not help if you change a single entry to repeating after creating the event.

I do this:

1. Tap + to add a new entry

2. Enter title, location, start and end time.

3. Tap Repeat and choose Every Day.

4. Tap Add to save.

5. Wait for a few moments for the entry to sync with Google.

6. Tap the entry, then tap Edit.

7. Tap Repeat, then tap Never.

8. Tap Done and choose Save for future events in the popup.

With the above, I don't need to change time zone and start time for entries.