Sync Your iPhone With Google Calendar

Cell Phones, Computers, Advice, Google, iPhone

Sync Your iPhone With Google Calendar

by Joshua Fruhlinger — Jul 5th 2007 at 5:00PM

If you're like us, you use Google Calendar to share work appointments and collaborate on scheduling meetings. It's a simple and nice alternative to Outlook calendar and it's accessible virtually anywhere. If you're still like us, you also have a new iPhone and you wanted all those Google Calendar appointments on your new device. The process is simple and painless, at least for Mac users with iCal.

First, go to your Google Calendar and find the "Calendar Settings" drop-menu. Click on that and go to "Calendar Settings."

Then, find the Private Address section and click on the ICAL icon. This will generate a URL for your calendar.

Open up iCal and go to Calendar -> Subscribe. Paste the URL from the Google calendar here.

Once your iCal is subscribed, your next iPhone sync will dump all your Google calendar events right in.

Done! The best part is you only need to do this once -- iCal will grab new appointments at your specified intervals and your next sync will be up to date.

Tags: google calendar, GoogleCalendar, sync

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Charlie Wood said 6:50PM on 7-05-2007

Note that this only gets events moving one-way: from Google Calendar to your iPhone. If you change or create events on your iPhone, they won't show up in Google Calendar. For that, you'll need something that does bidirectional synchronization, like Spanning Sync (spanningsync.com).

Cheers,
Charlie

toss002 said 2:38AM on 7-07-2007

How about with Google Calender for WINDOWS?

bb said 4:56PM on 11-29-2008

There is a beta "perfect" solution!
This is called NuevaSync
www.nuevasync.com

You register an account, and follows instructions given there, it's still beta but calendar sync works perfectly, and since I only sync calendar with it, there is no mess at all! You should do the same, I recommend it rightfully...

josef said 2:00PM on 7-09-2007

WINDOWS USERS -

Grab the html instead of the iCal link when following the the instructions above. Email the link to an account you've registered with your iPhone. Once your phone picks up that email, click on the link and add it to your favorites. You'll need to be able to access the web to view your Google calendar, but that hasn't been a problem for me.

numanuma said 3:00PM on 7-09-2007

Anyone try this with Outlook having Google cal subscriptions and the synch capability (on Windows)?

steve said 3:28PM on 7-10-2007

Is it possible to sync aol adress book contacts with the new apple iphone?

Andy said 3:53PM on 9-18-2007

@josef: That's nice until you want to add or change an appointment.

@numanuma: Just adding a Google Calendar subscription to Outlook 2007 won't work, unfortunately. The image on your outlook calendar is only one-way.

In the past, I've used a third party product called Companionlink. It is the only application I know of that will sync *any* Google calendar with *most* desktop applications. Here's the process: setup Companionlink to sync your Gcal and Outlook a few times each day. Whenever your iPhone is plugged in, it syncs with Outlook, thereby keeping everything all lined up. It works really well, and you never even have to open a microsoft product if you don't want to, although it does have to be installed.

David said 8:32PM on 9-21-2007

I think with http://www.jakeludington.com/ask_jake/20060818_how_to_sync_google_calendar_with_outlook_and_smartphones_automatically.html you can sync both ways from iPhone to gCal

Trunk Guy said 10:50AM on 9-29-2007

Annoyingly this does not work for me. My iTunes only sees old iCal calendars which have long been deleted. It does not see my new calendars or my Google calendars - any ideas?

Trunk Guy said 10:51AM on 9-29-2007

Annoyingly this does not work for me. My iTunes only sees old iCal calendars which have long been deleted. It does not see my new calendars or my Google calendars - any ideas?

OggSync said 1:23PM on 12-01-2007

If you are using Windows, you can sync your iPhone with Google Calendar and/or Exchange using the instructions on the OggSync web site.

Arnaud M said 9:28AM on 1-21-2008

WRONG OggSync, you only work if one is using Windows AND Outlook !! OggSync is NOT able to sync Google calendar and iPhone by itself, it merely relies on iTunes Outlook syncing.

bao said 8:44AM on 4-12-2008

Arnaud - did they ever say any different?? They did say "follow the instructions".

David Boreham said 11:36AM on 6-23-2008

When the iPhone 2.0 firmware is released, you'll be able to use its 'Exchange Sync' feature to achieve two-way over-the-air calendar and contact sync with Google using Nuevasync : http://www.nuevasync.com. This works because the Nuevasync server emulates an Exchange server as far as the iPhone is concerned. No software to install on the device, just configure its Exchange sync client with the correct host name, username and password.

monoomni said 3:26PM on 10-28-2008

it'd be nice if neuvasync handled multiple calendars...

stacyo said 12:59AM on 7-23-2008

Thanks. This is great.

andrea said 10:49AM on 7-28-2008

So: why can't I subscribe to my Google Calendar from within my MobileMe account?

elrj said 12:33PM on 7-31-2008

This all seems simple enough, but when I'm in iCal and I click subscribe, it thinks for a bit and pops up a second window with calendar name and options. When I try to click OK on this window, nothing happens: I can neither OK it or cancel it and I have to quit the program (although technically it is fine and still responding).

I've checked for updates, but it should be good to go. Should I uninstall and reinstall iCal? Why is it doing this to me?

Ben said 11:00AM on 8-06-2008

You can use www.nuevasync.com to use the new Microsoft exchange Push functionality of the iPhone to sync wirelessly all contacts via Plaxo. Also, if you use Plaxo to sync your multiple calenders to your google calendar then nuevasync can pull the google calendar to your iPhone too. This was great for me since I couldn't find any solution to migrating my Outlook 2003/Windows 2000 stuff to my iPhone. Now I wirelessly receive my contacts and calendar on my iPhone! No great solution yet for putting songs onto the iPhone 2.0 yet though.

Sync My Calendar said 7:00PM on 9-05-2008

I definitely would recommend Spanning Sync for 2-way synchronization, and with the new Spanning Sync Beta 2.0 you get contact synchronization. You can read more about my thoughts on Spanning Sync on my site at: http://www.sync-my-calendar.com/spanning-sync.html

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