I helped my boss today with a weird problem. In his calendars on his iOS devices, an extra line would show up, displaying the GMT time of the event. The event was placed correctly in the timeline, but it included the GMT time in the text. Naturally I did the obligatory Google search and found a lot of other users with the same problem, but not any solutions on how to fix it.
After checking all the settings on Google Calendar and checked the time and calendar settings, I couldn’t find anything wrong. But after checking out his iPad settings, I realized that the old IT guy had missed a thing.
We use Google Apps for Business at work. One of the nice things about that is that you can use the Exchange protocol instead of IMAP and CalDAV. I hate to admit it, but when used with iOS devices, using the Exchange protocol has several advantages. You get push email, making the connections instantaneous and the synching of calendars and address books are fast and reliable. His iPhone and iPad was set up with the standard IMAP for mail and CalDAV for calendars. The former IT guy made a mistake when setting up his devices, something that’s easily done when the setup box looks like this.
By instinct you would think that you should select Google, but that’s not the case when you have a Google Apps!. You should use the Exchange account setup button. If you have a regular Google account, you have to use IMAP and CalDAV unfortunately.
Enter your email address and password and on the next screen where you’re supposed to enter a server, you put m.google.com
Don’t forget to enter your email address in the Username field as well. Leave the domain field empty. Now you can get your email with instant push notification and sync your address book and calendars with Google Apps.
You can read Googles own description on how to setup an iOS device for Google Apps for Business here.
After moving from CalDAV to connecting to Google Apps with Exchange, the problem was fixed. The iOS calendar app no longer shows the GMT time.
Ben Kennedy says
It’s possible that your “fix” was merely coincidental; see: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/02/03/gmt-calendar-bug-fixed-ios-8/
Jack Zimmermann says
He was already on the latest version of iOS 8. So in this case it wasn’t coincidental.
Ben Kennedy says
Quoting the article: “Without installing a software update, several users … are reporting that calendar events are now syncing in the proper time zone on iOS 8.1.3 and earlier versions. Given that users were not required to take action, it is speculated that Google may have quietly fixed the issue on their backend.”
Jack Zimmermann says
yet, setting sync to CalDAV gave the error, switching to Exchange protocol fixed the problem. Setting it back, the problem reappeared. I’m Guessing that Google is fixing Apples sync bug protocol by protocol.
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