Phone clock issue after turning it off at night

Aerelnor

I’ve been having a weird issue with my phone’s clock for about a week now. I usually turn it off at night, and when I turn it back on in the morning, the time is always off by like an hour and some minutes. It only fixes itself if I go into the settings and manually toggle “Automatic date and time” off and on again. May you tell me what’s going on here? Any ideas on how to fix it? I’m also using a VPN, is it worth mentioning?

Novalissoide

Aerelnor by 'turning it off', do you mean disable the clock app?

nandohyphen1

Novalissoide by 'turning it off', do you mean disable the clock app?

Aerelnor Or do you mean turning off the phone?

Novalissoide

Aerelnor and look at these default GrapheneOS connections;
https://grapheneos.org/faq#default-connections

among which the Network Time update connection is mentioned. Your Vpn might be blocking that.

Aerelnor

Novalissoide No, I meant the phone. I turn it off at night, and when I turn it back on in the morning, it doesn’t show the correct time. It’s usually one hour behind + some minutes (like 20 or 10). So I usually toggle “Automatic date and time” in the settings as I’ve explained, and then the time updates, though if I don’t do this it won’t update on its own.

Aerelnor

Novalissoide I don’t really know how it works, since I’ve only been running GrapheneOS for a couple of months now. However, if it’s my VPN preventing the time to update, why would it supposedly do so only when I turn on the phone? Shouldn’t it be doing it always, theoretically speaking?

Aerelnor

Novalissoide Is there a way I can set my VPN to bypass that? This morning the time didn’t update at all until I manually intervened (one and a half hour after turning on the phone, basically).

Novalissoide

Have you tried waiting for some time after startup, could it be that the sync will happen, but after some uptime? Akin to when the OS looks for updates, which often happens after some delay.

Aerelnor

Novalissoide So, for three days I tried disconnecting my VPN before turning off the phone, so that it wouldn’t automatically connect on boot. Even though the phone still showed the incorrect time when I turned it on, it updated immediately. Last night, however, I left the VPN on and, when I turned on the phone, the time only updated after roughly 10 minutes. It seems that this delay is indeed connected to me using a VPN. This said, I still don’t understand why my phone by default shows the time incorrectly after being turned off for a few hours.

Novalissoide

And just to be sure; you haven't disabled the stock clock app right? It should be the one in use.

Aerelnor

Novalissoide No, I haven’t. The clock app is still active.

Benjamasu

Had the same issue, but that hasn't happened to me in a long time. For a while, I got into the habit of turning automatic synchronisation off/on after every reboot. Then I stopped doing that, and after a while, instead of turning off my smartphone at night, I started rebooting it (BFU). I haven't noticed anything like that since. I had the Clock app disabled in my Owner profile.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/23754-time-always-unset-possible-vulneravilty/6

In my case, waiting did not help. I noticed the time difference for the first time after about 3-4 hours.

Novalissoide

Aerelnor yes that's pretty weird innit.

de0u

Aerelnor I think that shouldn't happen, but on some units it does. When the system is "off" some low-precision time source keeps running, and it seems that on some units the precision is lower.

Aerelnor

de0u So the problem is with my phone, and the fact that I’m running GrapheneOS on it doesn’t really matter?

de0u

Aerelnor So the problem is with my phone, and the fact that I’m running GrapheneOS on it doesn’t really matter?

I believe so -- especially since the issue occurs when the phone is off. But you could experiment with flashing Google's stock OS onto the phone for a day or two.

Aerelnor

de0u That’s a bit unideal. I’d have to reinstall and reconfigure all my apps if I did that. Is there another way to check if it’s a hardware issue?

de0u

Aerelnor Is there another way to check if it’s a hardware issue?

Not that I am aware of.

This has been reported very occasionally, with no apparent correlation with GrapheneOS releases, and for sure no release has resulted in a spike of reports.

Basically, there is a very-plausible hardware explanation but not a plausible software explanation.

Aerelnor

de0u All right, thank you for answering. I see that GrapheneOS has a back-up tool – does it back up all profiles, that you know of? I’ll try flashing Google’s stock OS as soon as I can go without my phone for a couple of days.

Novalissoide

Aerelnor before reflashing and further testings, I recommend updating to the 2025112101 release of GrapheneOS, ideally with the Security Preview option turned 'ON'. The rrecent huge updates changed, and fixed a whole lot of things, so maybe start with that.