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IOS Timers Running Slow

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

PowerApp Timers on IOS are running about 16.6% (1/6th) slower than real time. (I.e. 1 Minute in real time is only 50 seconds on a timer in IOS). This appears to be IOS wide across multiple apps.

I have a PowerApp which I time how long a user has been watching a video ('AutoPause' is on so they can't navigate away from the screen and if a user skips part of the video the timer won't change). At the end of the video, the 'OnEnd' function assess' the timer value (i.e the amount of time the user has 'watched' vs. a threshold time which has a margin of error of around 5 seconds.

If the the timer value is less than the threshold time, it displays an error and restarts the video but if it was over then it progressed to the next screen. For every device except IOS, this check worked fine but for some reason IOS kept looping and the user couldn't progress. This would happen regardless of whether the video had played in full or not.

After a good while of trouble shooting, I discovered that on IOS (and IOS only) when the timer should be showing 159500ms (I.e. the length of the video) it was showing times in the region of 136500ms which is about 22 shorter than it should be.

To test this hypothesis, I build a test app with a 1 minute timer and timed it with a stopwatch on another phone and sure enough, on the stopwatch it showed 1 minute but on the app timer it showed ~50 seconds.

The solution to my app has been to increase the margin of error time to compensate for time running slower on IOS. If Microsoft could fix this ASAP it would be greatly appreciated!

IOS Version: 13.7 (and 13.6)

PowerApps: On IOS through Google Chrome (85.0.4183.92), Safari (Can't find the version) and PowerApps App (Version: 3.20081.20)

PowerApps Build Version: 3.20085.19

Categories:

Building Power Apps

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rimatos Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @Anonymous ,

I believe it would be better to raise awareness of this issue by opening a Support ticket through https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/support so this behavior can be investigated in more detail on oure end.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Ricardo
Jon-CoNP 32 on at

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I'm experiencing the same thing, but it's affecting my apps running through the web, as well. For me it's definitely not a 16% difference like you're seeing, but still odd.

I'm timing public speakers using an app in iOS to control the start/stop and another app to broadcast the timer through the web. Depending on the duration, both apps could end up 20 seconds apart by the end. I just ran a test for 5 minutes along with the built-in iOS timer as a control. When I started they were within a second of each other, but by the end they were 5-8 seconds distant.
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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My timer in Power Apps as compared to the real time (e.g. stopwatch on my phone) have a significant difference. The timer is significantly slower and I am not sure what to do.

My text property is:
Text(Time(0, 0, Self.Value/1000), "[$-en-GB]hh:mm:ss")

I am not using any IOS device nor are the other users that I have shared my app with. We are all experiencing long delays.
The only workaround I found was to use the difference between Now() and Start time. However, this would display the duration as elapsed time either in hours, minutes or seconds. But not in an "hh:mm:ss" format.

I hope that there is a solution to this.