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Level 1

9 points

Notifications when events are added on shared Google Calendar

Hello,

Apologies if this has been answered before - my question has so many common keywords that searching for it has been very difficult.

Here's the situation: my family all have iPhones (running iOS 11.2.6) and have relied heavily on some iCloud-based shared calendars for many years. The calendars were mine, and I shared them with my wife. Over the last year, my wife's iPhone started to lose these shared calendars. They would just disappear out of the blue. If I unshared/re-shared them with her, they would come back for a while, and then disappear again. I spent hours troubleshooting this with Apple Support, and they never could figure it out.

So, it's with sadness that I'm abandoning the iCloud shared calendars and moving to another system. I experimented with a lot of them, and Google seems to be pretty good, but I can't figure out how to get the nice notifications that iCloud would send me when my wife added, deleted, or changed an appointment on our shared calendar.

Here is our setup: I created a Google Calendar on my Google account and added it to my iPhone's Calendar.app. I also shared it with my wife's Google account via the web. I then went to the Sync Calendar Select website on my wife's account and set it to sync the shared calendar. Then I went to her iPhone's Calendar.app and verified that she can see it there and can add appointments. When she adds them, I see them in my calendar, but I don't get an alert when this happens, and I really miss that feature from iCloud.

So, to recap: shared Google Calendar is working fine on both my iPhone's Calendar.app and my wife's iPhone's Calendar.app, except that I don't get alerts when she adds/changes/deletes things, nor does she get alerts when I add/change/delete appointments on the calendar.

I have also tried using the Google Calendar app for iOS, and don't get notifications from it, either. I know that I can get emails when these things happen, but that can really clog up inboxes. Any ideas for how to get the iCloud-like alerts without using iCloud?

iPhone 7, iOS 10.2.1

Posted on Mar 17, 2018 11:12 AM

Best reply

rck77

Level 1

19 points

Posted on Mar 31, 2018 3:58 PM

I'm fairly certain that there are no such notifications available for Google calendars on iOS devices.

My wife and I have used Google calendars for years as our main calendars -- because their sync worked well with Apple apps, and, the web version was often displayable inside a firewalled area.

Displayed calendar on iMac with a browser or browser-based tool (therefore, it was displaying native Google calendar). Displayed calendaron iOS devices with an app called "WeekCal" or with built-in Apple Calendar app. When I make a change on a calendar, the change synchronizes up to Google's cloud, and from there, out to the iOS devices ... the calendars are all in sync ... with no notification. (If the other person is an "invitee" on the event, then the invitee will receive an email of initial invitation to the event, and to all changes on the event.)

It used to work well, just as described.

But recently, sadly, Google calendars are syncing rather poorly with my iOS calendar apps, like "WeekCal" and Apple Calendar. Will have to try out a purely Apple calendar sync setup ...

Good luck.

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Notifications when events are added on shared Google Calendar

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