Address Book sync to Gmail

The Apple address book doesn't do a real two-way synch (which would result in the same contacts in both systems). Rather, it makes the Google contact list visible inside the Apple address book, but doesn't move any data in the other direction. Among other things, this makes addresses that happen to be in both locations show up as two identical entries in the Apple address book. More to the point, addresses added to the Apple address book DO NOT appear in Google contacts, though the oposite is true (new Google contacts do show up in the Apple address book).

So, so-called synching works best if you use Google contacts as your real address book and then set up the Apple address book to mirror Google contacts. If you forget, and add an address on the Mac side, it won't show up in Google contacts, however.

this kinda doesn't work for me. I'm using mountain lion though. There is no "sync" button in the adddress book in mountain lion. This makes me wonder if Apple gave google teh boot completely.

I'm trying to work this out because I woudl liek to get an iPhone, if I can get all my acocunts synced together. So far that proofs to be real tough. It doesn't help that my apple account details are different from my normal google mail account. I managed to get my iPad somehow to sync my gmail contacts and calendar to my ipad calendar, but the address book in mountain lion does not sync even after setting up the account 9again, there is no "sync"button in address book mointain lion).

So far i have to conclude that if I want to use gmail, it won't work with my iMac...

I am using OS X 10.6.8 and indeed my Address Book is synced with my contacts in my Gmail acccount, bi-directionally. Allen.h, are you sure about your statement ?

The behavior I described in my note was correct at the time, but it's working now! Either Google or Apple fixed something, but I'm happy. I'm running 10.8.2.

I can't figure out how to delete my previous post, but it's working now (under OS X 10.8.2). Ignore the original post!

Google released support for CardDAV not too long ago.

http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2753077

Instead of checking the sync with Google option for "On my mac", I created a "Google" account in my address book by following the intstructions above. And now all is working perfectly -- syncing both ways.

And if you have another account, say Yahoo!, you can copy all the contacts from that account and paste them into your Google account, then do a merge for duplicates. Now your contacts in both Yahoo! and Google are in sync too. That's a bit of mannual work, but worth a try. 😝

I have the newest version of Mountain Lion. It is only syncing in the one direction as yours was. I set up a CalDav gmail account thinking this would fix it. It did not. Anyone have any ideas??!?

I had this same problem. I found that going to Settings > Mail etc > iCloud and unchecking the sync contacts resolved the issue.

In the contacts app I had sync with Google checked. However, this was not enough to perform a 2-way sync.

With both settings in Contacts AND settings sorted, it worked fine.

Just need to go through the duplicated now!!!