Caldav suppurt finally puts Google Calendar on iphone

Like a lot of people I have a Microsoft Exchange account at work and a Google account for personal use. Unfortunately the support for Google calendar on iphone has been hard to come by. There have been a few hacks to make it work. One involved setting up a dummy exchange account for your Google account on the iphone, but since iphone only allows one Exchange account per phone, this didn't solve the problem of the work and personal accounts.

Thankfully due to Google's support of CalDAV, and the addition of CalDAV to iphone 3.0 software, those of us who would like to use both Exchange and Google are able to do so.

I haven't seen much documentation out there for this, so I thought I'd post the instructions here. It's really pretty simple.

On your iphone, go to Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars->Add Account...
Select Other
Select Add CalDAV Account
For server put www.google.com
Enter your Google username and password
Click Next
Iphone appears to be aware of the proper CalDAV URL for Google accounts and fills this in for you.
If all is well you should see the "account verified" message.

With this set up you should now be able to see your Google calendar in the built in calendar app on iphone. You are also able to add events to your Google calendar within that app. When you add the event there is an option for Calendar that you can use to switch the desired target. I've also added my wife's Google calendar as well with no problems, so it's not subject to the one account limitation that Exchange has.

The big drawback I've run into is when you have multiple calendars in one Google account. I have a separate calendar for birthdays. When linking to the Google account through CalDAV though it only picks up your main calendar and leaves out the birthday calendar. I've gotten around this by using the iCal support and linking to this calendar separately. With iCal you can't add items to the calendar, but at least you can see it.

Another drawback could be performance. I've seen intermittent performance issues with iphone 3.0 so far and definitely some lag in the calendar. It hasn't been horrible so far, but I could see it getting annoying after a lot of use.