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Birthday calendar duplicated hundreds of times on iOS 10

Having recently upgraded to iOS 10, I see that my calendar app has duplicated the birthdays calendar hundreds of times - both on the Facebook calendar group and my default home calendar group. It has also duplicated my default calendar hundreds of times (See pictures below).


User uploaded file User uploaded file

The default home Calendar is easy enough to get rid of. I simply hit 'Edit' and delete each one one by one (which is annoyingly slow and tedious, but possible). However the 'Birthdays' calendars cannot be removed or deleted this way. There is no option to delete or merge them.


I've restored my phone's iOS on iTunes, hoping it would remove (or at least merge) the hundreds of Birthday calendar duplicates. However, after restoring my phone's software with a recent iCloud backup, the duplicates were still there.


Is this an iOS 10 bug? If not, is there a way to fix this?

iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 10

Posted on Sep 18, 2016 1:54 AM

Reply
150 replies

Feb 22, 2017 6:27 PM in response to Jesse - IL

Apologies for assuming the update was “the fix”, I’ve obviously ignored the steps I had taken prior.

These were a series of measures taken through sheer frustration allowing me to resolve the issue.


  • Deleted all accounts (comprising of iCloud & Gmail) from Settings>Calendars>Accounts
  • Disabled Contacts and Calendars from iCloud.
  • Disabled “Events Found in Apps” in Settings>Calendar
  • Logged out of Facebook in Settings>Facebook.
  • Deleted Facebook app.
  • Deleted Calendar app.
  • Installed iOS 10.3 BETA
  • Installed Calendar app.
  • Enabled Contacts and iCloud calendars


I’m not suggesting each of these in combination has resolved my issue, however it has left me 1 birthday calendar and a big smile 🙂

Jan 2, 2017 2:16 AM in response to Chrisdac

Got the same issue... did tons of tinkering to try fixing it:

- removed all calendars

- removed all contacts

- disabled relevant FB settings

- finally even restored my phone from iCloud


Nothing helped :/


After doing all of this I get to a different situation where I have about 1000 "calendar" calendars appearing locally on my phone and roughly the same amount of "birthdays" calendars under "other". The first type are deletable, the second aren't (I hoped that deleting the first will remove the second but this doesn't happen either).


Any clues...?

Jan 8, 2017 10:48 PM in response to brfperkins

This continues to drive me mad and I suspect Apple has no intention to fix other than to expect people to nuke their devices and start over.


I only have one duplicate list of birthdays. I deselect it in the calendar list to avoid the duplication in the actual calendar view. But I am sure this is linked with a negative impact on the birthday calendar on my syncd Apple Watch. It refuses to show birthdays automatically now in its calendar view. To force them to display I have to go into my contacts on my phone and go to the person whose birthday it is, I then change their birthday date, let it update and then go back in and change it back. Now the birthday shows in the watch calendar.


I am convinced it is linked because before the ugly duplication reared its head this was not an issue.


So frustrated by this and the silence from Apple. I refuse to pay for that tool to modify the backup and I do not have time to nuke and restart or go through the process of restoring from a backup. It rankles that this is a bug from Apple which they should sort out. They are too focused on forcing new features out like pointless new emoticons to worry about bugs or the stuff that the relentless iOS releases / updates seems to break

Jan 8, 2017 10:59 PM in response to Chrisdac

Hi,


This happened to my wife's new iPhone 7! The phone went from 100% battery to dead within an hour. First I thought it was the new Apple Watch then we noticed the calendar. The phone is so slow, because of the calendar app she could not even type anything without having to wait 5 seconds! I deleted the APP after reading this forum and everything worked 100% again. I then suggested downloading Google calendar while we wait for Apple to fix this Apple calendar.

Then it went slow again like a really really old computer - so we deleted the Google calendar app and everything worked again.


I 100% refuse to pay $30 for this fix! It's and expensive phone from the most profitable co in the world.

Jan 8, 2017 11:09 PM in response to ErinChampWalker

It is interesting you say this. I too use google calendar app and wonder if it is linked because I did grant it access to the calendar . I still consider this an Apple issue though. I could delete the google calendar app but as we have on of those Amazon echo devices it is very handy for calendar linking .


Whilst i am inclined to blame google calendar it is strange that our family has a couple of iPads too. Both of which have google calendar installed and the problem of duplicating birthdays does not show on either of these. Granted one iPad is still on iOS 9.3.5 and the either is my wife's iOS 10 iPad and s much less used device. But this kind of makes me think google calendar may not be the root cause on my phone and it's co incidence

Jan 8, 2017 11:23 PM in response to ErinChampWalker

Actually I did want to ask you. So your wife's iPhone also had duplicate birthday calendars after installing google calendar? And then when you uninstalled google calendar they went away? Has anyone else had positive results by removing google calendar app?


I might try this tonight and see if it makes any diff although I am sure I did possibly attempt this many many weeks ago - struggle to remember now!


Cheers, Wayne

Jan 9, 2017 12:06 AM in response to Scottyboy99

Hi,


No she did not have google calendar. She had Apple default calendar with all the duplicate birthdays slowing down the phone and draining battery. I then deleted Apple's Default Calendar - then everything was fine, but the phone was without a calendar.


I then thought download Google Calendar thinking the problem was with Apple's Default Calendar app. Once Google Calendar was installed the battery was fine, but the phone became super slow again like unusable almost. Once the Google Calendar app was deleted everything was fine!

Jan 9, 2017 1:15 PM in response to lirand

Absolutely shocking lack of interest from Apple. So tired of all these bugs in today's technical age. Windows 10 buggy, Mac OS Sierra buggy, iOS 10 buggy, even my Sky HD box is buggy - it's absolutely boring. As they strive to innovate they create bugs ontop of bugs. Wish they'd all just take a breath and consolidate . I'd rather less bugs and stability over new features which seem pointless and seem to dominate their priorities.

Jan 16, 2017 1:00 AM in response to Chrisdac

I have the same problem for 2 months now, I don't USE FACEBOOK AT ALL, I don't want to pay 30 $ to be able to use my very expensive phone (iphone 6!).

You Apple Techs, you 've got to provide a tool for free to resolve this bug that YOU did developp and to face your responsabilities, customers pay for that.


Best regards to poor iphone users like me

Jan 16, 2017 10:02 AM in response to Chrisdac

I went through support chat, and made sure to link them this discussion thread, and the decipher tools backup fix. Got on a call with their senior tech support, which had no solution for us. (As expected.) I did make sure to ask him to please get this flagged into the bug tracking system as unresolved, along with this thread. Hopefully that helps push this towards a future resolution.


Unfortunately, I don't expect them to do much until enough people actually go through the official support channels, so if you have some time, I would urge you to jump into a support chat room and flag this problem directly with Apple.


I went ahead and paid the $30 ransom to decipher tools for the fix. Worked fine.

Jan 18, 2017 4:42 AM in response to rainelenj

I raised to Apple support too. Plus over the months I have tweeted them countless times. Sent screenshots and link to this forum. That was on Sunday but haven't heard anything yet.


I don't suppose they will fix, their fix seems to be nuke / reset device and start from scratch. I am totally not prepared to do this or to mess about amending and restoring a backup. Even less so given that the decipher tool costs money . Apple should be fixing this without such draconian measures. have little spare time to undertake such measures anyway. I guess the only fix will be when and if (and it's a big if given the bug riddled state of their iOS) I get a new phone in several months time but that'll pain as I won't be able to restore a backup for fear of bringing this calendar bug into it

Birthday calendar duplicated hundreds of times on iOS 10

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