Use Google Calendar and iOS Calendar Together

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you all of the reasons that I use Google Calendar and iOS Calendar together. 

I did a video a little while ago encouraging you to ditch iOS’s innate Calendar app and use Google Calendar. I still totally stand behind that decision, but I have a confession to make — I didn’t entirely delete iOS Calendar. Instead, I use both apps together working in parallel  Google Calendar is my front man, iOS Calendar does some work behind the scenes. Let me show you how.  

Search

Searching your Google Calendar using a desktop browser is amazing, but on mobile devices the search function leaves much to be desired.  For example, if I’m searching for the last time I had dinner with my friend Debbie, the browser produces all of these results, while the mobile app only produces these.  It seems like it might be a problem with the amount of historic data that the app keeps or how far back it is searching, but I can’t figure out how to change that, so I just use the iOS Calendar for search.  Searching for my friend Debbie brings up everything in the last year, whereas the Google Calendar search only brings up future events. If I want to go back farther than that, I use Google Calendar for the desktop.  

Travel Time

This is a nice integration between Apple apps — the iOS Calendar can communicate with Maps to determine travel time for your appointment.  I have some issues with this, namely I don't find Maps to be particularly reliable and I can’t figure out a way to turn this on universally, but it’s a nice feature.  Google Calendar doesn’t have this yet, although apparently the Android Google Now app does.  So, in order to figure out how long it will take to travel to your appointment, you can go into your event, hit Travel Time, turn it on and select your mode of transport.  Then you can get an alert for this by hitting Alerts and choosing when you want your alert based on travel time.  You don’t have to use iOS Calendar as your primary calendar app to get the alerts — it’ll just come up.  You will need to make sure you have notifications turned on for iOS Calendar in Settings though. 

Change Calendar

I still haven’t figured out how to change a calendar on Google Calendar mobile once I've saved an event. If I need to switch an event from my personal calendar to the family calendar, I have to switch over to the iOS Calendar to do it. 

Siri

Again — we all know that Apple is territorial about how its apps play with others. Siri only works in a complex way with a handful of innate iOS apps - although I think Apple is working on APIs that will help third party apps integrate better.  But for now — Siri doesn't talk directly to Google Calendar. So in the meantime, I just use Siri to create appointments in iOS Calendar that automatically get shared with my primary calendar since they are both using the same set of data to display appointments.  Both apps write to and display the same database, so it doesn’t really matter which app I use to get the data in there.  The same thing applies to appointments that come in through . . .

Email or Text

I love the Apple integration between email, text, and calendar. Apple tries to figure out whether someone is making an appointment with you through email or text and will give you a shortcut link to make it into a calendar event. Yes — I take advantage of those shortcuts to make life easier. For example, Apple reads this email and finds a potential appointment. I click on this link, fill in the additional info, and it will appear in both Google Calendar and iOS Calendar. 

Watch

Google Calendar doesn’t have a watch app yet, but since I’m using the 2 apps in parallel, I can still use the iOS calendar on my watch to see my upcoming appointments.  And even more important to me — to get appointment reminders right on my wrist.  

iOS 11 Slowdown

And finally, since I’m still using an iPhone 6 which got ridiculously slow after I upgraded to iOS 11, all of my apps are running so much slower.  You can see my video on this.  iOS Calendar must take a lot less memory than Google Calendar since it seems to run significantly faster on my slothlike phone.  Until I upgrade, I have reverted back to the iOS calendar - but just on my phone — I still use Google Calendar on my iPad which is my primary device. 

And that’s it!  Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!