UPDATE 2015.03.09: The "GMT Bug" is fixed in the iOS 8.2 update that was pushed out today. Once you update your iOS device you will no longer see this on new appointments. If you want to get rid of the "GMT" tags on old appointments, remove the affected calendar from your device and then re-sync it. When it gets the appointments back down from your server they will all be at the correct times.
THANK YOU to everyone who called in, and submitted bug reports to Apple which ultimately got them to FIX this!!!
Apple, this is YOUR problem. It isn't "everybody else's problem." It is not "by design" or "intended behavior" of the Calendar app!! It's been around for 4 months and Apple employees are still telling customers they have "never heard of this before." Please get with the program, take responsibility, and FIX this BUG!
The "GMT Bug" affects users of Exchange and previously affected users of Google Calendar. If you are experiencing this on any other mail servers, please post about it in the comments. Even after multiple reports about this "GMT Bug" in the mainstream media, Apple continues to inform users who call in for tech support that they have "never heard of this before." Users that inform their tech support reps about the Apple Support Communities thread and various articles about the GMT Bug are then told that it is not a bug, but "by design." That's correct: Apple continues to insist that the arbitrary reassignment of user-entered calendar events to GMT time zone is how they designed the iOS Calendar to work and that it's working perfectly when it does this......
This is an "Informational Rant" about a major bug in iOS 8 that affects anyone who uses a Microsoft Exchange or Google Calendar hosted account for E-mail, Contacts, Calendar, Etc. So basically most people in corporate environments in North America. This bug is a deal-killer. If I were an IT Manager for a large corporation considering a huge deployment of Apple products and saw this, my decision would be "No way. Not if their quality control is so crappy they miss something this obvious."
I love my Apple devices. They have worked consistently and perfectly for years. The same two devices have been running on my same AppRiver hosted Exchange account for months without any problems whatsoever....and before that they ran perfectly on my previous Exchange account. The bug I am showing you in this video appeared in September.....right after I updated to iOS 8.
The bug causes any calendar event created on an iOS device to transpose to GMT time when another iOS device syncs it down from your Exchange server. Events that are created directly in Outlook do not get transposed to GMT time. Once an appointment is incorrectly changed over to GMT, if you want to fix the transposed appointment...it's an 8-step process.
Apple's initial reaction to me....and the many other people who took the time to post about this very same issue....is that "it must be due to some problem at all of our various Exchange hosts.....couldn't possibly be an iOS 8 problem." Strange theory given that ZERO appointments created by non-iOS devices (i.e. Outlook) on the server get synced to ALL iOS devices correctly, yet EVERY appointment created on an iOS device gets synced to other iOS devices INCORRECTLY. Also, the only variable in my tech ecosystem that changed recently was the iOS version which updated to iOS 8 in September. And when did this problem start happening....right after the update in September. I may not be a qualified Apple genius, but I have a high enough IQ to realize that these things are probably related.
I spent hours exhausting possibilities with my local Apple Geniuses (including completely factory resetting both of my Apple devices with a virgin factory image of iOS 8.1 to "prove" this wasn't some setting or other software I had installed), and with Tier 2 tech support at AppleCare, and they are finally looking into this on their end.
HERE'S WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING THIS BUG:
Post to the Apple Support Communities thread about it. Click the link below which takes you to the very FIRST post of the thread. Before you post, click on the "I have this question too" hyperlink that is on the first post in the thread. Then add your comments to the thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/...
Call Apple Care at (800) 275-2273 and make sure they ESCALATE your case to upper level tech support. You can also submit a bug report on this here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone....
Send a Tweet to Tim Cook on his Twitter Account:
https://twitter.com/tim_cook
@tim_cook
Apple, you make the best mobile computing devices in the world IMHO. Please get with the program and FIX THIS FAST!
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I'll get back to you.
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