Unsure how the "Set Automatically" feature works on the Playdate, but this is reproducible on both the hardware and the Simulator.
I am in India, where the timezone offset is 5:30, ie 19800 seconds. However, the time that I get when I turn on "Set Automatically" is with an offset of 19080 instead of 19800 . This makes my clock move backwards by 12 minutes. So it is 15:42 in India right now, but my playdate says 15:30 instead.
I believe it goes off your IP address to set the time. I'm not sure how ipstack (the API Panic uses to do this) calculates the location (or if it calculates the GMT offset), but the fact that the two numbers are one digit off makes me think someone made a typo.
Classic time zone snafu: our code assumed full hour offsets, so it was doing offset/100*60*60, where offset is in +HHMM format as returned by strftime(%z). Here it was calculating 530/100*60*60 = 19080.
Thanks for catching this! This is on the server side, so I believe we'll have it patched soon.
To close this thread: this seems resolved now. Thanks!