Android Forgets pre-1970 Birthdays

A friend of mine (@jcpandrade) just sent me a strange report that indicates that at least some Android devices might be forgetting the birthdays for people born before 1970. His report follows:

I've beem using Outlook's and MS Exchange calendar for years, as well as its contacts. So, I usually keep their birth dates in the correspondent contact field, and Outlook takes care of creating a recurring yearly event for the birthday. It's a simple "all day" event, repeating every year. And that way, I can easily keep tabs on who's birthday is coming.

However, on my Optimus Madrid (a gingerbread Android smartphone), synced via Exchange corporate account, I found out that I had no birthday event for everyone born before 1-1-1970! (EPOCH).

But there's more: if I create a recurring yearly event starting on January 1st, 1970... it shows up fine. But if you edit it to begin on Dec 31st 1969... Android keeps it on the original Jan 1st date!

I've found that this happens in more devices as well, as I verified the same behavior in a Nexus S (Android 4.0) and Samsung Galaxy S2. On an iPhone 3GS, there's no such issue and the events work up as expected.


A really weird case indeed. But if you happen to have MS exchange synced birthdays on your Android, you might want to verify if everything is working as expected... or risk forgetting someone's birthday... if he or she's over 42!