Why Why Why Why Your iOS App Might Act Weird around New Year's

by Lou Franco

Filed under: iOS

Consider this snippet from a playground

let df = DateFormatter() df.dateFormat = "YYYY-MM-dd" df.string(from: Date(year: 2017, month: 12, day:30)!)

The result is "2017-12-30" as you might expect.

But, try the next day:

The reason is because YYYY is not what you think it is. The correct way to format the year part of a date is with yyyy . There’s a good answer on StackOverflow that explains why, but the short version is that YYYY is part of a formatting system based on week of the year, which always starts on a Sunday (EDIT: in the US, that is. Other locales’ weeks start on different days, so the exact dates that will be wrong vary by locale — thanks to dc6k and others on r/iOSProgramming for the correction)

December 31st, 2017 is the first day of the first week of 2018. If you are using the week-of-year formatting system, then YYYY is what you do to get the year part out. On other years, you might find that the first week of January has a YYYY of the previous calendar year.

So, stop what you’re doing right now and search your codebase for YYYY and fix it if you find any. You have a week or so to submit before Apple closes the App Store for the holidays.

Don’t feel bad if you find it, though. In 2013, Apple got caught with the YYYY bug and in 2014, Twitter went down for five hours because of it.