Apple Contacts app and Calendar not showing "Birthdays" when using Google account sync

[islack]

Does anyone use their Google account as their primary "contact" sync location in iOS17?

There's a software bug where my contacts "Birthdays" will not show up in Apple Calendar and Apple Contacts.

- Creating a brand new contact with a birthdate WILL sync to Google's servers (as confirmed by visiting https://contacts.google.com/)
- Viewing existing contacts that have a birthday in https://contacts.google.com/ DO NOT SHOW UP on the iPhone at all.

If I change my settings from Google to iCloud this works fine but Apple support is not being helpful at escalating this bug to their engineering department.

 

[BrianBaughn]

It was working in iOS 16?

 

[islack]

It was working in iOS 16?

Yes

 

[butterboi]

Yes

Experiencing this now. Any luck on your end?

 

[firesuite]

I'm not the OP, but this behavior has been driving me crazy for years. I've used Google as my primary contact sync platform for a long time. The only way I've ever been able to get the contact birthdays to show up on an Apple Contacts app (and Calendar) is by adding a birth YEAR. Any contacts without a birth YEAR will not sync back to Apple's software. This often means adding an (often incorrect) dummy year, just to get it to sync properly. There are multiple posts about this in the Apple Support Community, and I've submitted a bug report with Apple via their feedback form. Please consider doing the same– maybe they will pay attention if enough people complain.

 

[daddop]

I've stumble upon this today, after doing some investigations it seems that the problem isn't the IOS contacts app, it works correctly. The problem is in the implementation of the Google CardDav server.
You can verify it yourself, just create a contact without a birthday year and export it in the vCard format, you'll see something like this:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
FN:Name Surname
N:Name;Surname;;;
TEL;TYPE=CELL:+390000000000
BDAY:--1201
CATEGORIES:myContacts
END:VCARD

Here Google is using the carddav v3 that doesn't support the BDAY in that format. The version 3 supports only these formats as stated in the RFC2426:
BDAY:1996-04-15
BDAY:1953-10-15T23:10:00Z
BDAY:1987-09-27T08:30:00-06:00

So I think that the Google server is sending the data in this format to the Contacts app and since this isn't supported in the version 3 the contacts app just ignores the field. If you try to self host a different CardDav server like Baikal that supports CardDav V4 it works just fine with the IOS Contacts app.
Sorry for the very technical answer but I didn't see an explanation to this in the internet. We should send a feedback to Google via the Send Feedback feature in the setting page of the web interface of Google contacts.