How to sync Google Calendar with your iPhone

Posted by Trevor in General on October 27, 2008
5 Comments

I recently bit the bullet and picked up an iPhone, and it's been great... except that it can't sync up with my Google Calendar. I had figured out a trick that allowed me to subscribe to a private RSS feed of my calendar in iCal, but that's only a one-way deal.

I just came across some good news, though. Google has enabled CalDAV, which means you can easily have two-way syncing between your Google Calendar and iPhone.

Just follow these simple instructions from their support site, and your Google Calendar will appear in iCal's list of calendars, and iCal will sync any changes to and from Google Calendar. If you've enabled syncing between iCal and your iPhone, you're good to go.

There's also instructions for getting this working with Mozilla's Sunbird.

(via swissmiss)

Sweet.

Update: Sorry to get your hopes up - this doesn't work as expected because adding events on the iPhone are not synced back to your Google Calendar, just iCal. See the comments for details.

5 Comments

 Scott M.

Nice find.

October 27, 2008
 Jonathan Marcus

I wished real hard this were true, but CalDAV calendars won’t sync from iCal to the iPhone. You have to use something like Spanning Sync, Busy Sync, or the free Calgoo.

October 27, 2008
 Trevor

@Jonathan, I’ve got everything working aside from adding events on the iPhone Calendar and getting them back into Google Calendar. I’m trying to see if there’s a way to get that, but without it the dream of two-way syncing is dead :(

October 27, 2008
 Kim Pepper

Hmmm. Whenever I add an event in my iPhone, it automatically puts it into a ‘local’ calendar in iCal rather than my caldav’d google calendar. This prevents new events entered in the iPhone ever synch’ing with Google Calendar.

Am I the only one?

October 27, 2008
 Trevor

@Kim, that’s the same problem I’m having. Everything works except for adding events on the iPhone. That action creates a new iCal calendar, which basically ruins the whole two-way thing. It’s a bummer. I’m trying to figure out a workaround, but please do let me know if you come across anything.

This article as a bit more detail. It seems that something like Busy Sync is required to get this working now.

I see some rumors that this is just a bug, so perhaps it’ll be worked out at some point. The more I dig, it appears we’re not the only ones that expected this to work. Sorry to have gotten your hopes up :(

October 28, 2008

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