Calendar Not Syncing

Thank you very much for all of your suggestions. Unfortunately nothing I tried will get Google calendar events to synch. I tried all of your suggestions. I was able to get iCloud events to synch but only until I enabled the Google account. Nothing would synch after that, regardless of source. I'm going to continue to follow up with Apple.

Hi, Jeff,

Did you try going to your Google Calendar settings at https://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1#settings-calendars_9 (on the web app, go to the "Calendars" submenu under "Settings") and scroll down to the bottom, where it says "Other Calendars" and seeing how many subscriptions you have there?

When I first went there, I saw I had accumulated over 100 subscriptions (Google Calendar stupidly subscribes you to each calendar you look at by searching for a person, but then it takes multiple clicks to unsubscribe from the same calendars; so most people just let them accumulate). If you have a bunch of calendars there, apparently this will trigger a bug whereby the watch sync fails (silently) due to too much data to sync.

I'd be surprised if you didn't have a ton of subscriptions there (whether you realize it or not). Though if you used the link I included in the earlier post, it should have shown you and let you tell it not to sync them. However, I'm not 100% sure if that method really works; when I got mine working the first time, I unsubscribed manually from all the Googler calendars I'd inadvertently subscribed to, and it was the #1 thing that fixed my problems.

Steve

Yep, that was one of the first things I tried when initially working through the issue with Apple Support. I'm down to two calendars, one of which is very sparsely populated. Sadly it made no difference.

Two more data points:

(1) I reinitialized the Watch and iPhone completely (set up as a new iPhone and a brand new Watch). I was able to see iCloud events sync immediately. Google calendar events are invisible on the Watch but continue to sync fine on the iPhone.

(2) To my complete surprise, I just got a ten-minute warning notification on my Watch for an event on my Google calendar! I even have a screen shot of it to send to Apple support. The event still doesn't show up on the Watch Calendar, however. I'm beginning to think that some of the data has in fact synched to my Watch but the Calendar app isn't showing it. This is the first solid evidence I've seen that this is an Apple bug and not a problem with the account access or privileges.

No, that's just a routine iPhone calendar alert that got mirrored to your Watch. The underlying calendar event data is still not on the Watch. I have the same problem.

Ah yes, good point.

Also, Watch update 1.0.1 has not helped at all.

I have just three sync'd calendars and they're all on my iCloud account. Nothing related to Google or Exchange. My calendar data syncs, but there's always a lag. I can't figure out how long it's supposed to take the data to sync after a change or whether there's any practical way to force a sync. Considering the Watch's purpose as a way to instantly glance at information, this is a pretty huge fail if the data is not kept up to date.

After doing everything suggested on this thread with my Google calendars (and then some!), here's what I discovered:

Deleting my work Google calendar from my iPhone suddenly caused all my other calendars (one personal Google calendar, one iCloud calendar, Holidays, and Birthdays) to quickly sync to the Watch and stay in sync with the phone. If I reintroduced my work calendar in any way — via Exchange, CalDAV, or iOS's native "Add Google Account" setting — everything would stop working.

Hypothesis: If you have even a single calendar that is jam-packed with events, the Watch will get overwhelmed and syncing across all calendars will fail. Try deleting your most complex calendar from the iPhone, and the others might quickly be unblocked and start working fine. (And I do mean delete — you can't just "uncheck" it in the iPhone's Calendar app so that it gets temporarily hidden, because those events, while hidden, will likely remain cached in the Watch's memory.)

Seems like a Watch OS bug. Till then, this isn't really a device to help you navigate your day, unless you rely entirely on iCloud or on really simple calendars.

Yeah, I concur. I'm considering developing a workaround by creating a little JSONP server web app which can serve me a couple of week's worth of Google Calendar meetings and then synch it to an iCloud calendar via the Apple Calendar app. Two weeks worth of iCloud meetings shouldn't be too much for the Watch to handle. I was pleased to discover that you can now script apps in Yosemite using JavaScript instead of AppleScript. I'd rather program in assembly code than use AppleScript. Worst. Scripting. Language. Ever.

Amitabh, I know it's painful to read all my long posts, but I did explain the model for syncing up above (on page 2, May 16, 5:07pm and the very next post where I corrected and added some more).

Basically, there's a ghost intermediary server that you can only see out of the corner of your eye, on those dark nights you are sure you saw something, but then, no.. It was just a trick of the light. But trust me, you don't want to look directly at the server. If you look at it, and see it, and believe it exists -- know it exists -- at that moment it will swallow you whole. So definitely, Apple doesn't want you to know about the ghost server that's actually pulling your data somewhere into their dark black cloud, and then oh so seamlessly (but only if you believe there are no seams) pulling your data down to the phone and then, only then, without wires or mirrors or other tricks, magically copying them to the watch .. oh wait, there's a glitch .. sorry, the watch sync failed. Errors? No, there can't be errors. Not if you don't believe...

Steve

So after some further exploration a few things have become apparent. As far as I can tell the Watch's calendar only updates once the iPhone's calendar has updated. And the iPhone's calendar only appears to update when the phone is unlocked and the Calendar app is opened. In other words, the iPhone's calendar can fetch updates but it doesn't appear to be receiving push updates from iCloud.

I found this related thread that suggests a possible fix:

Since upgrade iOS 8 calendar sync push not working properly

Someone wrote that the issue was resolved by logging out from iCloud on the iPhone, rebooting, and then logging back into iCloud again.

Freediverx01, that point about the calendar on the watch being an exact mirror of the iPhone was my "step 0" in the post I made on this thread, May 16th. I also pointed out the same other things -- i.e., that the updates don't get fetched from "fetch" sources unless you physically unlock your iPhone *and* open the Calendar app on the iPhone. Which is *ridiculous*, but still, that's how it works. (Note: "push" sources update instantly end-to-end. Which further makes the whole thing very confusing and frustrating, and is likely why many people think iCloud works better -- it does.

But Exchange works just as well, because iPhone calendar (and Watch calendar) can be done via "push" (so changes are reflected almost instantly end to end).

To test that, I set up my domain's Google Calendar as an Exchange calendar, set it to "push" on the iOS Calendar settings, and it works great -- instantly. But since Google disabled this feature just last week for its own employees, nobody who works at Google can use that awesome feature. :-( I may want to steal Jeff's syncer hack, but that's for another thread not on this forum. :-)

But yes, once you've eliminated the likely source of the sync crashing (i.e., out of memory due to too much stuff), you definitely must completely purge the iPhone state so it will correct resync.

Note that you can't just hide then re-show the calendar on iPhone. It only proves the connection is working between the two; but doesn't resolve any corruption in the data that was caused by an out-of-memory crash (which is unlogged, and for which users aren't notified -- hence my, "do not look directly at it" post above).

You need to actually delete the calendar from the iPhone (which as you say, is entirely safe since everything's in the cloud, in one form or the other).

To delete the calendar, I have had less success disabling/re-enabling "Calendar" in the iPhone account settings for the service (e.g. Google calendar as a source in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings) as opposed to the better way of simply deleting the entire account from there, and re-adding it -- but first rebooting everything, making sure it's clear, and then re-adding and waiting for it to re-sync first on the phone, then hopefully on the watch. But if the same out of memory error happens again, you'll be right back where you were.

And note: repeating events simply do not work correctly so don't waste your time worrying about them -- when troubleshooting, be sure you're working with single-instance events.

Steve

Another Googler here. I've been following this thread and have tried all of the suggestions with no luck. My calendars initially synced when I set up the watch but I realized after a few days that they weren't updating, so I went through the various incantations suggested here and only managed to remove everything from the watch. It still won't sync back, even with a minimal set of calendar subscriptions, removed and re-added accounts, rebooting in between, etc. Yet another smartwatch that fails the "you had one job" test. I can only cross my fingers and hope Apple is working on it.

Oh, man, Masto, that is maddening to say the least. I had similar problems, but was eventually able to get it to start actually working, and now it works great (though I never get updates for repeating events; e.g., if I delete an instance of a repeating event on Calendar, it never disappears from my watch, even though it does in fact disappear from my iPhone). So that implies there are definitely bugs in the sync model between the iPhone and the watch, that just further complicate an already complicated model.

I'm guessing you have something in your setup that's causing the sync between the phone and the watch to crash (probably OOM but maybe some other bug triggered by the exact pattern of data you have). The only way to resolve this and know for sure would be if our friends at Apple would post *any* information telling us how to get stack dumps or at least detect crashes on the phone sync. Otherwise, how do we have any model to troubleshoot our problems? :-( But I am guessing if you try divide and conquer with your calendar, you can somehow get it to flow again. I would say first turn off bluetooth so the phone won't try to sync as soon as you reboot (see next steps), delete the account again from your iPhone, reboot, launch calendar first (before doing anything else) and let it clean up its internal state. After a while, turn back on bluetooth to allow the watch to re-connect and sync. (This only works if you rebooted with bluetooth off; if you leave bluetooth on when rebooting, it will just reconnect and probably wedge again.) Then, once you're sure the watch is getting the cleaned-up sync state from the phone having wiped its calendar data, only then add the account back in. If that works, then yay.

What's most maddening here is that it's clear that yes -- this *should* work. This is the primary case for most people to get value from a digital watch. (Notifications and Calendars). I mean, it's really key. But it's also clear that Apple's robust testing of their own product using their employees as guinea pigs didn't identify this major flaw because *100%* of Apple employees (and testers) use iCloud for their primary corporate calendars. So they use it way more than the rest of us. They probably thought of Exchange as a proxy for the rest of the world's calendars, and made sure that worked too (because it does!). But they screwed the pooch and dropped CalDAV and Google Calendar in particular completely on the floor. Inexcusable.

Steve

"updates don't get fetched from "fetch" sources unless you physically unlock your iPhone *and* open the Calendar app on the iPhone... Note: "push" sources update instantly end-to-end..."

So today calendar changes made on my Macs push almost immediately to my watch, even though my iPhone is locked. This thing is a total crap shoot. It's bad enough when something doesn't work and you have to go through a tedious process to correct it. But not knowing when it is or is not working makes this utterly useless.