New in iOS 7: Clock app icon now displays real time

clock icon live

As we continue to dig through all of the new features and UI changes in iOS 7, we’ve come across a minor, yet interesting, detail. It looks like the Clock app icon now displays the correct time, and has an animated second hand.

At least, in all of Apple’s screen shots it shows the correct time. Notice in the image above how the time on the Clock icon matches up with the time in the status bar. But I can’t for the life of me get it to work on my iPhone 4S…

I’ve tried everything from turning off the ‘Set Automatically’ option in the Settings app, to switching time zones. But my iOS 7 Clock icon still seems to be a good 5 hours behind my Status bar clock. At least the second hand moves.

I imagine this will get fixed in a future iOS 7 release, but it still strikes me as a bit odd. With the current time shown on the Lock screen, and other places in iOS, why did Apple feel the need to make the Clock app icon show realtime information?

Personally, I would have preferred a live Weather icon. But I’m guessing that would require resource-draining location data.

What do you think?