Why a birthday shifts by a day across time zones: a date-only storage bug

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A user enters a birthday of 12 June, but after travelling the app shows 11 June even though the entry was never changed. The cause is that the app stored the calendar date as a midnight UTC timestamp, which is a specific moment in time. When that moment is converted to a local time zone such as Los Angeles, the resulting date can fall on the previous day. The article explains that a birthday should be represented as a date-only value, such as Java's LocalDate, and preserved as a date through the API and database. It also recommends testing the full save and reload path across several time zones, and warns that existing timestamp data should be checked carefully before any migration.

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