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

@JG in SB: Excellent post. I was going to check the sync-across-devices issue on my devices, but I am actually unable to set up Gmail calendar on my iPod Touch. Be that as it may, I wanted to let you know that this error only occurs for me with Gmail calendar -- not Microsoft Exchange or Yahoo! calendar. Gmail calendar is my default; if I create an appointment, GMT conversion occurs. It does not occur with appointments I create and then select Microsoft Exchange or Yahoo! calendar. If I create a Microsoft Exchange appointment, then edit it to Gmail calendar, the GMT appears. If I edit it back to Microsoft Exchange, the GMT remains. So, it is always Gmail that introduces the GMT error for me. I hope that's helpful.

Follow-up: I changed my default calendar to Yahoo! Newly created appointments do not have the GMT error. I can edit the appointment to change the calendar to Microsoft Exchange and still no GMT error. However, when I edit the appointment to change the calendar to Gmail, the GMT error appears. So, I'm leaving my default calendar at Yahoo! until some solution appears.

I Was just able to edit out the GMT time zone from an appointment. I created an appoint net on my iPad. A second later it added the GMT entry. I opened the appointment to edit it. It tried changing the times. Nothing. I then turned on all day appointment and then turned it off. I was able to edit the appt in my real time zone, EST. This worked twice for me. I will continue to try again in a while.

I Had similar success on my iPhone. When you change the appointment to all day and then back again, the time is set as the GMT time zone. So you have to change it back to the time you really want the appointment to start at. So if I create an appt at 3:00pm est, the 8:00pm gmt time will show in the body of the appt. when you turn on and off all day, the new time will be in est or your correct time zone but will start at 8pm. You just have to change it back to est or your proper time zone. Hope this makes sense. .

@Gator5000e: That makes sense..because what is happening when you toggle "All Day" on is that on your local iOS device, it clears out all start and end times and substitutes 12:00 AM to 12:00 AM the next day. But when you then go and toggle "All Day" back off again, and re-enter the correct times, you are just editing the appointment....same as if you never touched the "All Day" setting. And the appointment will look correct on the iOS device you just edited it on. But if you check any other iOS devices that the newly "corrected" appointment syncs to, it will be transposed to GMT.

I am still waiting to hear the final results from Kid Dynamic's testing....but if you sync using Google Calendar I predict that the GMT thing will show back up on the appointment after some time passes. This will happen even if you are only using a single iOS device but you sync to Google Calendar. I have a pretty good idea why this happens to Google users...and I can be a lot more certain about it after Kid Dynamic finishes the testing he is doing (BTW THANKS for doing that Kid Dynamic). Google calendar appears to handle synchronization tasks differently than Microsoft Exchange does...and the way this bug shows up on devices of Google users is related to this difference.

Let us know if the GMT thing pops back up in those recently fixed appointments and/or shows up for the same appointments on your other iOS devices.

Here's the latest update: Everything is as it was yesterday. (see below)

Both appointments that originated in the Google calendar on my Mac are still at the correct time zone. So it seems that only appointments that are created on the iPhone, and that are attached to the Google calendar, are affected by this bug.

And this jibes with the other posts here. Moving an appointment from one calendar to another on the iPhone is essentially re-creating the appointment on the new calendar, so is affected by this bug. It would also explain the issue I've been seeing with Facebook appointments for a while now, where it shows (GMT) on the entry, because those are created automatically by my phone. I've seen (GMT) on those for at least a month... which makes me suspect that:

1. The bug is within iOS, but

2. Recent changes with Google's calendar service have revealed the bug.

3. Whatever server Facebook appointments are saved on has the same issue, and has had it for a while.

I could see this being a (mis?)configuration on the servers, creating a non-standard environment, and recent iPhone updates has made it more picky (read: engineers saying "if they won't follow the rules, we'll just have it break"). This could be argued to be a "feature" I guess (but those kind of engineers are so annoying to the end user.)

OR: iPhone is creating or misusing some feature or data field in the appointment, and no one else in the universe is creating or misusing this field. This would be definitely a bug. I suspect this is what's happening.

If iOS is setting a field unique to iOS appointments to the value of the server's time zone, and no other device or service creates that field or can read that field, and only other iOS devices can read that field and so manifest the bug... maybe there's some kind of automated "cleaning" script that can strip that particular field out of all the appointments and thus iOS would see it as any other appointment. This might work on Exchange servers where IT can run scripts... but I don't know how to accomplish this on Google calendar.

If you use gmail (Google) calendar I can tell you how I corrected mine. I logged onto to google calendar and removed time zone settings by telling Google not to convert the time to any zone. Do this by clicking on the time zone and checking remove event time zone.

Yes, thank you JG in SB! That's exactly what I meant. I know for certain that I created appointments last week (after I had upgraded to iOS 8.1.1) and the events are correct with no GMT add-on. It was only yesterday that I noticed the GMT change. At first i thought it was a bug related to creating an event from an email or online service like Evite/Paperless Post, but the bug manifests when I create the event originally on my iPhone. I upgraded to iOS 8.1.2 yesterday and that did not fix the problem.

Some more points to add:

1. By default, I use my gmail acct to create appointments on my iPhone calendar

2. All new appointments using gmail acct have the GMT add-on.

3. This GMT anomaly only appears on my iDevices (iPhone & iPad).

4. When I check the entry on the Web version on Google calendar on my MacBookPro, I see no reference to GMT.

5. If I switch it to iCloud calendar and create a new event on my iPhone, the GMT add on never appears.

Here's hoping we get some resolution soon.

JG, the bug is not translating over to my iPad after I edit the appointment using the All Day on-off trick; the appointment on my iPad came through without the GMT entry in the body of the appointment and without GMT in the time zone field. For kicks, I edited the appointment on my iPad to see if it would add GMT. It did not add GMT; The edited appointment also came though back on my iPhone without the GMT entry;

So a round about solution appears to work this way:

1. Add an appointment on the iPhone,

2. Let the GMT bug hit,

3. Open/edit the appointment

4. Turn the All Day switch on and then off,

5. Correct the appointment to the correct time for your time zone,

The appointment appears to stick with the correct time across synced iOS devices.

Working for me so far. A pain in the butt, but at least it gets rid of the GMT bug for now.

Try looking at my previous post. When I removed the event time zone in gmail and synced with my iPhone, the GMT dissappeared.

Thank you Kid Dynamic for testing and reporting back. I believe I can explain why you are seeing this even though you are just using a single iOS device. It is for the exact same reason described in the AppRiver blog post I provided the link to above.

Google Calendar handles synchronization differently than Exchange. It appears that if the Google Calendar server receives new data from a subscribed client device (i.e. your iPhone) the server acquires the data and then it effectively says "new data just showed up....time to sync this data to EVERYTHING that is subscribed to me!" It then syncs that data to every single subscribed device...including syncing it back down to the iOS device that you just created the appointment on. This is why when you create the appointment on your iOS device it does not have the GMT thing on it, but then GMT "shows up" after a few seconds. The clean version you see immediately when you hit save on the iOS device is the original appointment you created. This then goes up to the Google Calendar server....picks up the system set time zone from the server because of the buggy iOS code embedded in the appointment...and then is synced back down to your iOS device which then displays the server system time (GMT). So in your case, your single iOS device is operating as both the originating device and then a few seconds later...as the receiver device!

When you create an appointment directly on the Google server using your browser, that appointment does not have the buggy iOS 8 code embedded in it. The server still says "time to sync this down to EVERYTHING" but since the buggy code is not there, it doesn't pick up the sever system time setting and subsequently does not display GMT on your iOS device (or devices if you had multiple ones). If you subsequently edit this very same appointment on your iOS device, GMT will show up a few seconds later once the newly updated appointment which now includes the embedded buggy iOS code goes up to Google and is resent to your iOS device a few seconds later when Google see the updated detained pings it out to all subscribed clients...

This bug on your single iOS device is identical to the one on my iOS devices, but in your case, because of how Google handles synchronization tasks, you are going to see the bug even using just one iOS device. In my case, I will only see the bug on the "receiver device" if I am using at least two iOS devices because Exchange handles synchronization like this: when Exchange receives new data from a subscribed client device, the server acquires the data but then it only sends the newly acquired data to the OTHER subscribed devices. Exchange does not resend the data it just received back to the device that it received it from....because Exchange knows that device already has the data on it.

I think we can be 100% certain that: a) the bug is a result of embedded code in appointments that is generated by iOS; and b) that it occurs and is displayed for the exact reason described in the AppRiver article I linked to above.

Also, once Apple fixes this, we won't need any fancy script to go through and "fix" all of the appointments in our calendars...we will need only to delete the calendar account and then re-create it. When the newly created account syncs with the server for the "first" time, it will just pull down all the existing appointments, but since the buggy code that displays the server system time and transposes the appointment to the server set time zone won't be there any more, the appointments will be at the correct ties and in the correct time zones even if some kernel of bad data still resides in them. That's my theory anyway 😉

@Gator5000e: I will test your workaround on my setup and report back later. Thanks for the info!

Hi JG,

Yes, I agree with your assessment. That's an interesting distinction between how Exchange and Google sync with devices.

However, one correction. I found that, if I created the appointment on my Mac with Chrome, and then edited it on my iPhone, it did NOT show the GMT bug. It's only the appointments created on the iPhone that show them.

In the above screenshots, the entry "Mac Chrome GCal IPhone edited" is the one that I created on my Mac and edited with my iPhone. The edits included changing the time of day and the name of the appointment.

When I open an appointment that displays the GMT bug (created on my iPhone) with the Web version of Google calendar, I don't get that time zone removal option you're showing. Here's my screen:

Doing this for every single appointment is not practical, especially for those people that have lots of meetings. This would be especially frustrating for Executive Assistants who manage multiple calendars. I'm so happy that's not my world anymore.