How do I setup Android contact & calendar sync?

1

OK, I have been pulling my hair out regarding syncing. I have tried several tools and URLs and not a single thing has worked.

I was hoping that the Owncloud install could work for this. I have noticed that the baseurl is different with MIAB, using /cloud/ rather than /owncloud/. Unless I have completely missed something, anyone know the trick to making this work out? I have acquired DAVDroid and CardDav-sync from the Play Store. Neither are pushing any of my phone contacts over.

So what am I missing?

PS: I did reference this page to no avail : https://davdroid.bitfire.at/configuration/owncloud/

2

I don’t use those clients, but the CalDAV url that you need is for example:
https://example.com/cloud/remote.php/caldav/principals/you@example.com/
^^ be sure to change example.com to your domain and you@example.com to your email address

SSL is on and port is 443

I don’t use the Contacts feature but I imagine it to be very similar to the above

3

Thanks v60fan

Unfortunately this isnt working. I did try that before, and retried just in case I had a typo. The link I included in the original post has that and the carddav links needed. Unfortunately I see nothing in OwnCloud whatsoever. Still sitting at 0 contacts and 0 calendar entries.

4

I use CalDAV-sync and CardDAV-sync, and have not had any problems syncing my phone with the data in Owncloud.

However, I think you are trying to import data from your phone into Owncloud. I have not tried this, and don’t know if the sync clients support this functionality.

Can you manually export the data from your phone, and use the Owncloud web interface to import the data into Owncloud?

5

rbow1, I havent had the time to try your idea, which I will, but this is backwards. I am not going to be adding contacts into the server, rather my phone will be the first point of contact management. So if I cannot push the contacts to the server, it seems rather pointless.

One thing I thought I tried in both areas, was to create dummy items and see if they show up on my phone. I know the calendar appointment did not. But thats not something I really care too much about. Although it would be nice to have that option to totally dump Google’s services in their entirety.

In the meantime I have been looking into alternative solutions to handling this all. Frankly from what I have seen, sync seems to be a broken mess across the board. Flaky would be a best case scenario with many of these projects.

Thanks for the heads up though. Regardless of what the reality is, at least I know now that this may not have sync support actually since sync implies bidirectional traffic. That does indeed explain a great deal if it is unidirectional.

6

It should be working. I use both CalDAV and CardDAV on my phone using DAVDroid and I think they both work fine, although there’s sometimes a long delay before it syncs.

7

How can I troubleshoot this? Nothing is working and it’s becoming quite the time sink wading thru useless Google queries.

8

Have you tried using another device running android?

Try this. http://www.bluestacks.com/

If you can use the account on the environment above, it has to be something wrong with your phone.

9

OK, I do have another phone that is doing the same thing (nothing). Thanks for the tip there, I am kinda ashamed I didnt think of that.

As for bluestacks, I cannot even try that as its a Windows only product and I use linux (Red Hat Enterprise 7.2 to be exact).

Now I have regone thru the logs on the older (second) phone, and I literally see nothing that shows things arent working. the account that I setup was a stab in the dark with DavDriod’s automated detection which properly figured out (according to the logs) the Calendar and Contacts URLs and said it sync’ed them, and mentioned something about various types of entries being processed. But zero errors.

10

I just tried with Bluestacks, worked fine.

Although I used this app instead.

Try adding your credentials manually? Rather than the automated detection.

Server name: box.yourdomain.whatever
Username: you@yourdomain.whatever
Password: the same password you use to access your box

There is no reason why this should not work for you but does everyone else.

11

thanks, but something is wrong somewhere.

I have used now, three devices, all varying Android revisions, and nothing is getting pushed or pulled from OwnCloud on Miab or a standalone Nextcloud instance. What am I missing? Is there something in addition to the sync tools that I must do to the device for the contacts to be “visible” to the sync tools? I have setup numerous times on each of these devices both DavDroid and CardDAV+CalDav (paid versions of both) and its getting and pushing nothing.

Is there an Apache/Nginx setting that I must fidget with? For MiaB I have only touched the mail side to enable pop3/pop3s and added glances from apt. On my standalone server, I have done a bunch on that one. It runs quite a bit, I figured I would at least try to sync there to see if perhaps I had an install error of MiaB and could just redo that. Clearly that was inconclusive to say the least.

If anyone has any troubleshooting tips that would be appreciated. I have no idea what data is being attempted to be pushed to the servers (all three tools have logs which are not all that helpful as of yet), nor what to poke with on both MiaB and my Nextcloud install.

Thanks.

12

Made alot of progress here. It was indeed BOTH the server and the phone. The server ran into an issue with an immutable blob from a failed upload. After a ton of troubleshooting I figured I would share some resources. Firstly, before I broke my MIAB install, I started the testing and double checking on a Nextcloud install on my main website’s VPS. I ran litmus (https://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?t=21185) on that URL and things were OK, and again on the MIAB, again OK.

After a bit of digging around I found that some phones handle things a bit differently, and in my case a Cyanogen Fork (OnePlus One’s OxygenOS) and a Nexus (6P) make the display and access to the addressbook a bit funky. After getting things working via another tool (Copy Contacts, $1.99 on Play Store), I was able to start getting things working after the fix for the blob was put into place (need to dig up URL on that one still, cache on another computer has it).

So to sum things up, DavDroid, Tasks, and Copy Contacts are actually needed for at least a good portion of the Android user base. You will need to copy/move the contacts to the DavDroid addressbook for syncing to other locations (you can thank Google for this one).

Things do indeed work now. Playing with AquaMail as a GMail replacement IMAP GUI. Sofar so good.

Hope this helps others that may have been clueless and frustrated that things were not just magically working, blame Google, they overcomplicated things by locking down the address book (the root cause of about a month of BS).

Thanks again, all, even if it may not have seemed like you helped, you did. Knowing that this SHOULD have worked out of the box with the toolchain(s) that I had stumbled into, was actually the best advice given.