In dealing with Android devices, I’ve observed plenty of inaccurate – and sometimes downright
wrong – system times.
I do not have access to many iPhones, but those I have seen have accurate times.
Is the time GMT on iPhones always accurate? (E.g. speculate you could use network time or build-in ntp or use the time in GPS fixes to adjust drift; all this could occur in the platform so that applications are insulated from trying to determine the time themselves)
If the iPhone time functions do not represent a reasonable real-world time, how would you determine the real-world time?
Many phones are able to get the local time from the network provider – although I’ve seen that be a few seconds off here and there.
If you really need to be accurate – you can get your time from an NTP server and correct for local time using the phone’s locale.