Verifying the Time & Date on iOS

A look at getting the true time and date.

Time is unique in the modern world because it is one of the very few things we all agree on. Yes, it’s true the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, absolutely everyone on the planet agree about this one thing — time. Of course it hasn’t always been that way, in fact it wasn’t until 1884 that the world agreed to agree what the time is. Implicit within that agreement we have this concept of hours, minutes and seconds too, units we also thankfully agree on.

What’s really useful from a coding point of view about this agreement and its units of measurement is that it is global shared standard & reference point. Indeed if you think about hours, it’s astounding to consider it’s the same minute past the hour everywhere on the planet at the same time. Google it. Whatever the minute past the hour is as you reading this, it is the same number of minutes past the hour on the other side of the world too.

Now the techs in the world needed their computers to agree what the time was as well. We as the human race may have agreed in the late eighteenth century, but astonishingly you will surely be surprised to learn it wasn’t until 1980 that the techs came up with a working plan to get computers to agree with each other too. Remember that the fledging internet had been alive for some twenty years that point. It was a second agreement one hundred years in the making.