Sync iCal, Google Calendar and the iPhone wirelessly

Google recently introduced Google Sync for iPhone, which allows you to sync Google Calendar with your iPhone wirelessly. Combined with BusySync, you can keep iCal, Google Calendar and your iPhone in sync wirelessly, without having to invest in MobileMe. And unlike the limitations in MobileMe, you can sync WebDAV calendars to your iPhone (like Holidays) as well as the Birthdays calendar, with BusySync and Google Sync for iPhone.

Following are step-by-step instructions for setting it up.

Configure BusySync to sync iCal and Google Calendar

In this example, there are four calendars in iCal: Home, Seattle Xcoders, US Holidays, and Birthdays. And there is one calendar on Google: john@google.com.

Three of the calendars in iCal appear under the SUBSCRIPTIONS heading. These calendars will not sync to the iPhone when using MobileMe, but they will sync to the iPhone when using BusySync and Google Sync for iPhone.

Next, open the BusySync prefpane and select the calendars in iCal you'd like to publish to Google, and the calendars on Google you'd like to subscribe to in iCal. Whether you are publishing or subscribing, the calendars will sync in both directions and the calendar events can be edited in both iCal and Google.

After selecting the calendars you wish to sync with BusySync, the calendars you subscribed to on Google will appear in iCal, and the calendars you are publishing from iCal will appear on Google.

You can now create and edit events on these calendars in iCal and Google and BusySync will keep them in sync.

Configure Google Sync for iPhone

Now that you've got iCal and Google syncing, the next step is to get your iPhone syncing with Google. Here are the instructions from Google's Mobile Help page.

• Open the Settings application on your device's home screen.
• Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
• Tap Add Account....
• Select Microsoft Exchange.

• In the Email field, enter the name of the account (anything you'd like).
• Leave the Domain field blank.
• Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username.
• Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
• Tap Next at the top of your screen.
• A new Server field will appear. Enter m.google.com.
• Press Next at the top of your screen again.
• Turn Calendars ON.

You've set up Google Sync for your iPhone. Synchronization will begin automatically if you have Push enabled on your phone. You can also open the Calendar app and wait a few seconds to start a sync.

By default, Google will only sync your primary Google Calendar with your iPhone. If you want to sync more than one calendar, there is an additional step:

Open the Safari browser on your iPhone and go to http://m.google.com/sync. Sign in with your account and select the calendars you want to sync with your iPhone. Once you've selected the calendars you want to sync, they will appear on the iPhone on your next sync.

You can now add and edit calendar events on your iPhone and they will sync to Google wirelessly, and from there they will sync to iCal via BusySync!

Note: If you're using Google Apps, you will need to enable ActiveSync for your Google Apps account before you can use Google Mobile Sync.

Summary

Comparing Google Sync for iPhone to MobileMe is not an apples-to-apples comparison, given all the added features that MobileMe provides. But if your primary interest is in syncing calendars between your iPhone and Google Calendar, then Google Sync for iPhone is a great alternative.

Comments

[Roland J Young]

Love, I have this setup as above, with a couple of calendar,s plus I have Google sync running on my PC to keep in the sync and work PC, which sync my work calendar to a google account;

It all sounds very complicated but it pretty simple,

Busysync to sync my mac to home google
Google Sync on PC to sync my work cal another work google
Home Google has my work google; uk holidays
iPod Touch with Google Sync google;

All so essentially I push everything to one google calendar;

[James Martin Moore]

If you use Google for domains, use this URL:

https://m.google.com/sync/settings/a/example.com/iconfig/

[Chris]

Thanks for the timely post. It is support and information sharing like this that makes a great application like BusySync all the more worth the price.

[T.J. Lahey]

Alternatively, if you want more than 5 calendars, you can use Nuevasync (http://www.nuevasync.com/) which supports up to 8. What I find unfortunate is that there is no way in either Google Sync or Nuevasync to avoid syncing the default Google calendar which I don't use. I couldn't find any way to tell BusySync to sync one of my iCal calendars to the default Google calendar.

[T.J. Lahey]

Nuevasync has increased the number of calendars supported to 11 which now is more than enough for my usage.

[Jose]

What about Contacts? I now bought BusySync and I have a BlackBerry. With Google Sync thrown into the mix, it almost perfect. I'm missing the Address Book sync, though. The reason is that in many emails I get a vCard and on opening it the contact details get added to the Address Book. If Address Book could be synced with Google Contacts which get now get synced to my mobile, I would have a worry free solution. Any ideas on that one?

[simonf00]

Hi Jose,

If you have Leopard then the address book has the ability to sync to google built in. Just open the Address Book preferences and in the "General" pane, right on the bottom you should find a button to configure synching to Google.

[Oliver Nielsen]

Very cool! Busy Sync rocks! Thanks guys.

[oz]

Further to Chris' comment, it's annoying that the default gcal is idle. Makes for the possibility of creating an event in it by mistake. Would you recommend subscribing to the gcal default calendar (Making this your core calendar) rather than publishing from iCal to Gcal ??

[John]

Oz -- You can do both, publish calendars from iCal to Google, as well as subscribe to calendars on Google. Yes, I do recommend subscribing to your primary Google Calendar and using it as your default calendar in iCal, especially if you frequently create events on Google Calendar (since it is they will default to the Google primary calendar).

[Betty]

Hi I followed all your instructions here, by setting my google email account through Microsoft Exchange and entering m.google.com in the server field. Then I synced my calendars and everything worked as expected.

But now I cannot access my gmail account. All my calendar information is updated and syncs regularly as I make changes in google calendars or ical. But when I try to check my mail through iphone, it says "The connection to the server failed." It has been like this overnight, and I can check my other email account. Can you please give me some advice? Thanks.

[John]

The iPhone doesn't support syncing gmail via Exchange. It just supports syncing calendars and contacts with Google via Exchange. You'll need to turn off Exchange syncing for gmail, then create a separate account on your iPhone specifically for connecting to gmail as a regular mail server.

[Benji]

Hi there,

Thank you for this very helpfull post.

I'd just like to share with you a language problem that I had.
I have more than one calendar on google, and I wanted to access them all on my iPhone. But when going to m.google.com/sync, I got a message telling me that "this service is not available for your device". The message was in German, probably because I live in Switzerland. Fortunately, this web page also allows you to choose a different language for the display of it. So I chose english, thinking that with the message in english, I could more easily google for a solution. But when changing to english, instead of getting the same error message, I got to the point where you can choose which calendar to synchronize. So my problem was solved :-)

[PS]

The main problem with this method is that the iPhone only works with one ActiveSync account. Thus, if you've got an MS Exchange account already, you can't add the Google account. Any way around this?

[John]

PS - You may be able to sync your iPhone with Google via CalDAV. It's a bit cumbersome for secondary calendars though. Here's a blog post the explains how:
http://blogs.sun.com/chienr/entry/configuring_caldav_on_iphone_3

[PS]

John. Thanks for your reply. I've tried to find the answer to this, but the instructions you gave me seems to require me to make my calendars public for me to access them via CalDAV and to change them. My questions are: Do I really need to make them public? If I don't which private address do I use (HTML, XML, ICAL) that's listed in Google? If I need to make them public, can anyone then find/access/change my calendar on the web?

[PS]

Nevermind, John. I found my answer. For those that want to know how to add multiple calendars via CalDav: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=49fe939571160fb2&hl=en. Also, you don't have to have the calendars public to be able to sync to the iPhone.

[Paul Burd]

For events, this is working flawlessly for me. But, Alarms / Reminders are another story. Both Busysync and Google Sync seem really flakey when syncing alarms. No matter if I enter the alarm in Google Calendar, iCal, or the iPhone... it's hit or miss if it gets synced to the other 2.

[John]

If you edit an alarm on an existing event in iCal, the change will be synced to Google immediately. However, any alarm changes made on Google Calendar won't sync to iCal unless you edit some other attribute of the event as well, like the event title or description. This is a bug in the Google Calendar API. Google is aware of the bug and will hopefully fix in a future update. More info here:

http://www.busymac.com/faq/index.html#google-alarms

[Paul Burd]

Thanks John. I saw that FAQ, but it doesn't seem to be holding true, at least not for me. Over the past couple days I've experimented with every possible way of entering / syncing / editing events with Reminders, and it just comes down to... sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. For instance, I can add two events in iCal that both have alarms, let them sync to google, and then open google to find that only one of them has an alarm. The same scenario can occur if I enter the events in Google, or on the iPhone. It's just plain odd.

[nico]

I have signed up for this service but for some reason my changes in google cal show up on my iphone cal, but not in iCal after I sync. Any ideas?

[Maddy]

i am having a sync problem, any help would be appreciated!

I have three calendars in gmail
-my own gmail calendar
- my boyfriends (gmail) calendar
- australian holidays
I have had my iphone set to sync, which has been working well. (I synced them the way that gmail tells you to).

HOWEVER i have just bought a macbook, and using ical i tried to sync both my iphone and my gmail contacts, so that I can enter something into any of those calendars and they will all sync..

That seemed to work initially, my ical and my gmail now have the syncing thing going on - except my problem is that in my iphone I have duplicate events. (im finding this difficult to explain!)

So in my iphone I have my boyfriends calendar, the australian holidays calendar and TWO of my own calendar. I'm assuming it has something to do with it syncing twice, but for some reason I cant figure out how to fix it!

How can I set it up so that my gmail, ical and iphone are all in sync, without duplicating the calendars? I just downloaded busysync and tried to set up a sync there... now i have four of everything.... ARGH!

help would be hugely appreciated.

Maddy

[Wick]

Same problem as Benji that hasn't been answered yet:

"The main problem with this method is that the iPhone only works with one ActiveSync account. Thus, if you've got an MS Exchange account already, you can't add the Google account. Any way around this?"

[Summer]

How can you synce your ical & google cal w/o adding it through Exchange? I already have another email synced through exchange and when I tried to add another, my iphone said you can only have one. help please!

[danny]

same problems over here as benji and maddy, any help would be appreciated.

"The main problem with this method is that the iPhone only works with one ActiveSync account. Thus, if you've got an MS Exchange account already, you can't add the Google account. Any way around this?"

[Ross Shannon]

I also had duplicated events once I set this up (disappointing, as I thought the point of this was to enable my existing calendars to be updated wirelessly, rather than adding a new calendar to the phone).

However, one workaround that seems to work so far is to set up your calendars via Exchange as described above, and then do NOT sync those calendars from your computer to your iPhone over USB. This way, iCal on your computer is synced with Google Calendar at all times via BusyCal, local calendars are synced to your iPhone via USB, and changes to your remote calendars will always land on your iPhone over the air, and those calendars can be synced back from iPhone to desktop too.

[Lisa]

I am able to set this up so that events entered on the google calendar appear on my iphone but my iphone events are not coming through to the Google calendar. I have an older iphone but am updated on Software. Any ideas of what the issue might be?

[Dave H]

Same issue as Ross

[Andrew]

@Ross, Lisa:

I also had the issue where I would add calendar entries in google and they would show up on my iphone, but not going the other way. To get entries to sync FROM the iphone TO google, I had to do one of the following:

In the iphone calendar app, select "Calendars" in the upper left, and then select only your google calendar. Now when you add entries they will show up in google.

Alternatively, I re-setup the Exchange account on the iphone, and this time I selected "Delete Calendars" from the iphone. This deletes the local stuff, but has the benefit of now there is only "One Calendar" on the iphone, and anything that gets added on the phone gets synced to google, and vice versa.

[Dustin Gillingham]

I can do all of this without Busy Sync. Snow Leopard allows you to Sync with Google calendars and setting up the iphone they way you show and that's all you need. Why do you need Busy Sync?

[nathan]

From what I understand Busy Sync allows everything to talk to each other in either direction. Without it you can get Google calendar to send to iCal and the iphone but not the other way around.

Make sense?

[h-man]

This is greatly appreciated!

[Kristoffer]

Can I determine the color of the Exchange calendar on the iPhone?