Mac Facts #6: Syncing Google Contacts and Calendar to Your iPhone

A long time ago, I did a series of posts on "Math Facts and Mac Facts": weird little things I had to figure out how to do on my mac, and figured might be useful to others out there. Well, I've spent this morning doing just that, so I thought I would share what I've learned with all you out there.

Syncing Google Contacts and Calendar to Your iPhone

For a very long time, the iPhone has had the capability, through iTunes, to sync your contacts with Google Contacts. It was as simple as checking an option box in the info tab when your phones synced:



Additionally, Google introduced CalDAV support last year, meaning that you could sync iCal and your Google Calendar (instructions here, if that's all you're looking for). Therefore, you could have some version of calendar syncing on the iPhone by syncing Google Calendar to iCal, and then syncing iCal to the iPhone. This solution lacked both elegance and utility, as any event entered on the iPhone would not sync back to your Google Calendar without both syncing the phone AND running iCal to sync back to Google.

Well, if this problem has been plaguing you, fear not. Google recently announced Microsoft Exhcange Activesync support, which meant you could get over-the-air sync between your Google contacts and calendar and the iPhone. This is what I set out to enable.

Problems

The instructions for such a journey can be found here. Chances are everything will go well, as long as you pay attention (I missed the step where you're supposed to enter m.google.com as the server at first, but realized it quickly when it wasn't working). The problems I encountered had to do with keeping what contacts and calendar events I already had on the phone.

It's easy to keep what you've already got. Just don't "Delete" when given the option. The problem is then that you'll have duplicates for everything. This is apparently not an uncommon problem, particularly with the new 3.0 OS. There were a couple solutions, but I found them to be unsatisfactory kludges. I think what I came up with is simpler, albeit slightly less functional.

Solution

I wanted to have over-the-air syncing for my calendar AND I wanted my phone to be free of duplicates. I realized that continuing to sync my iPhone to iCal was pointless. iCal syncs to my Google Calendar whenever I open it, and the iPhone syncs through exchange to my Google Calendar over the air. So I turned off iCal syncing in iTunes. (Bonus tip: if you want to select which calendars to sync to the phone, go to m.google.com/sync.)

The contacts, on the other hand, proved a bit more difficult. I wanted them to continue syncing to my computer, but I also wanted Google to continue syncing them. I realized the best thing to do was to turn off over-the-air syncing and continue running contacts through iTunes.

So, summary: install the Activesync, sync calendars, but leave contacts alone. All done!