CalDAV Connection to Google Calendar on the iPhone/iPad Fails

Caldav problems on IPhone googleI am sheepishly writing this blog post in hopes that someone else might save a few minutes when they are trying to set up their connection to Google Calendar via CalDAV and failing repeatedly. I spent 30 minutes figuring this little user error out.

The mistake I made was to keep mistakenly clicking “Add CardDAV Account” instead of “Add CalDAV Account”. I tried it several times and followed the same wrong path. Sheesh. It does not help that the screen to add a CardDAV account is exactly the same as the screen to add a CalDAV account and the CardDAV link is first.

Yes – I get it. I should have read the screen before clicking – but on the small iPhone I just scanned too quickly. And looking at the screenshot, it might be hard to imagine that anyone would make such a mistake – they make it pretty obvious if you slow down to read what is on the screen. Once I got to the CalDAV screen it worked perfectly. Not surprisingly when I put my Google credentials into CardDAV, it failed every time.

The real information for how to do this properly is here at Google:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=151674

The instructions are well-written and quite simple. This blog post is only for those of us who read screens impatiently and try to do five things at once.

By the way – thanks to Google for the CalDAV Feature – for the first time in over a decade, my desktop, web, and handheld calendars are all read-write from all my devices. I know that it has been possible for a long time but I never liked server solutions or pay solutions. The last time I had this was Windows Mobile 2.0 on a Casio in 1998, I think. Good times.