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   Google Drops Google Sync for Most iOS Users

   Michael E. Cohen

   For a while now Google's Help pages have been steering users away from
   using [1]Google Sync, which uses Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync
   technology for mail, contact, and calendar syncing. Now the future
   picture of device syncing with Google services is clear, albeit not
   particularly rosy: in a page titled '[2]Google Sync End of Life,' the
   company says, 'Starting January 30, 2013, consumers won't be able to
   set up new devices using Google Sync.' Instead, users are instructed to
   set up new devices using the following protocols for device syncing:
   IMAP for email, CardDAV for Contacts, and CalDAV for calendars.

   For those who have already set up their devices to use Google Sync, the
   end of the world is being postponed indefinitely: Google states in the
   same document that the service will continue to work for existing
   Google Sync devices, and that Google Sync will continue to be offered
   to new users of Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government.
   (Note that we haven't found a way to convert a regular Gmail account to
   a Google Apps account ' what's more, Google Apps is designed for
   businesses or organizations with multiple users; no single user option
   seems to be offered.)

   Though Google Sync has never progressed beyond beta status, on iOS it
   has been the only syncing method for Gmail accounts that provides push
   email to iOS devices; the more open IMAP service offered by Google does
   not. In the early days of iOS (before it was even known as iOS), device
   owners who wanted push email and who had both Gmail accounts and
   Exchange accounts (the latter perhaps through work or school) faced a
   difficult choice: the operating system only provided one Exchange
   ActiveSync account per device, so device owners had to choose which
   account to use on their devices. More recent versions of iOS have
   provided for multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts on one device, so
   users could set up multiple Gmail and Exchange accounts on their
   devices and get push email through all of them. Those were the glory
   days.

   And those days are coming to an end. In fact, those days are already
   over for Google Calendar users: Google Calendar Sync was made
   unavailable to new (non-paying) users on 14 December 2012, although it
   will continue to function for those who have already set it up on their
   devices. New users instead will have to set up CalDAV accounts to
   access their Google calendars on iOS devices. They can do that, of
   course, through the Gmail setup assistant on iOS as described in
   Google's current [3]Calendar Help document. Similarly, those who wish
   to sync their Google contacts on iOS via CardDAV can also use the Gmail
   setup on their devices as described in Google's [4]Contacts Help
   document, even though the Google Sync option for contacts still remains
   available to new users until the end of January 2013.

   The fact that Google now supports open protocols for mail, contacts,
   and calendars is a good thing, of course, but that goodness is not
   unalloyed. As noted earlier, IMAP does not provide a push email
   capability, so iOS users will have to set up a fetch schedule for it on
   their devices to be alerted to new messages in a timely manner. And
   with CalDAV instead of Google Calendar Sync, new calendar invitations
   will only be seen when users open the Calendar app on their devices '
   CalDAV does not push them.

   For those of you who have a new iOS device and want to receive push
   email from Gmail on it, time's a-wastin': you have until the end of
   January 2013 to set it up.

References

   1. http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=135937&topic=27549&ctx=topic
   2. http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2716936
   3. http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674&topic=13950&ctx=topic
   4. http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2753077

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