Android Room database does not natively support timezone-aware date/time storage. The canonical approach of mapping java.util.Date to Long loses timezone information. A better solution uses the ThreeTen-BP library's OffsetDateTime class with custom TypeConverters that serialize values as ISO 8601 strings (e.g., 2013-10-07T17:23:19.540-04:00) stored as SQLite TEXT. This preserves full timezone data. For correct chronological ordering in queries, SQLite's built-in datetime() function must be used instead of plain string sorting, since lexicographic ordering breaks when rows have different UTC offsets.
