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iCloud vs Google (contacts, calendar)

F

Fontane

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 3, 2011
190
11
I recently switched gmail to fastmail and am very happy. Fastmail doensn't offer sync for contacts and no calendar service at all (yet).

So I'm thinking of switching my contacts and calendar from google over to icloud. Can anyone offer some insight about their experience with using icloud vs google? There are a lot of threads I've read, but many are dated to when icloud was spotty.

How about an update from someone who has used both -- which do you prefer?

Just interested in contacts and calendar for right now.

Thanks!
 
You'll get votes for both, I'm sure.

Personally, I'd never have my email hosted separately from my calendar, or set up anyone that way, since appointment invitations are connected between the two.
 
I've switched my calendar over to iCloud from Google and it seems pretty good so far. Ok with making occasional changes to repeated events and works better with invitations.
 
I decided to move email, contacts, and calendar from google to iCloud a few days ago. So far, I have no complaints.

Since I purchased an iPhone 5s, I lost gmail push and needed to rely on the gmail app. I like the new Mail app in iOS7 and prefer it over the gmail app, so those factors were the primary reasons for the change to iCloud. I have my gmail messages forwarding to my iCloud address, and am notifying my contacts of my email address change.

Everything appears to be working well. New and/or edited items in Mail, Calendar and Contacts sync almost instantaneously between my iPhone, MacBook Pro, and iCloud.
 
For me it's most certainly iCloud. If you're all Apple iCloud is perfect and everything syncs very well. In addition, I believe that if you set your iTunes ID connected to your iCloud to the new email address then all the calendar invitations you receive will go to iCloud immediately.

Hope this helps,
Pietro
 
BrianBaughn said:
You'll get votes for both, I'm sure.

Personally, I'd never have my email hosted separately from my calendar, or set up anyone that way, since appointment invitations are connected between the two.
Click to expand...

It's actually not a problem. I also use Fastmail for my email, and I use iCloud for my calendar. When someone sends me an invitation, it comes to my email address. When I accept it, it goes onto my iCloud calendar. Not a problem.
 
matt2053 said:
It's actually not a problem. I also use Fastmail for my email, and I use iCloud for my calendar. When someone sends me an invitation, it comes to my email address. When I accept it, it goes onto my iCloud calendar. Not a problem.
Click to expand...

That's good. Is that across all devices? Also, what happens when you send an invite from your iCloud calendar...does it come from your Fastmail account?
 
BrianBaughn said:
That's good. Is that across all devices? Also, what happens when you send an invite from your iCloud calendar...does it come from your Fastmail account?
Click to expand...

Receiving and sending invites just opens whatever the default email/calendar client is on your device, the two really have nothing to do with each other. You can receive and accept an invite from any email app using any email account on any device and it'll just push it to the default Calendar app. If you send an invite from Calendar on iOS (or Fantastical, or anything) it'll just pop over to Mail and use your default account to send it.
 
NMF said:
Receiving and sending invites just opens whatever the default email/calendar client is on your device, the two really have nothing to do with each other. You can receive and accept an invite from any email app using any email account on any device and it'll just push it to the default Calendar app. If you send an invite from Calendar on iOS (or Fantastical, or anything) it'll just pop over to Mail and use your default account to send it.
Click to expand...
If you use Exchange accounts with both email and calendar, it is more integrated than that. Invites will be sent from the address associated with the account where the calendar entry was created (not necessarily the default account), and invites automatically appear (as unconfirmed) in the calendar even if you never read the invite in the mail app.
 
Tried to do the same. In short, iCloud Contacts are great. iCloud Calendars just do not work.

Here's my experience: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1628437/

Fully agree that Mail + Calendar on the same platform is a huge boon, especially with Gmail as it automatically pulls invites into your calendar from any sending client.

Also, Google Contacts will constantly rotate your contact's pictures, which is annoying, but having them separate from Gmail is even more so, so for now I stick with Gmail for everything.
 
fivedots said:
Tried to do the same. In short, iCloud Contacts are great. iCloud Calendars just do not work.
Click to expand...

Haven't had any issues myself — but then again I don't get a lot of "invites". The vast majority of events are just made by me. I share one calendar with my daughter (also on icloud) and that works really well. I would say it's a bit of a stretch to claim that they "just do not work".

Fully agree that Mail + Calendar on the same platform is a huge boon, especially with Gmail as it automatically pulls invites into your calendar from any sending client.

Also, Google Contacts will constantly rotate your contact's pictures, which is annoying, but having them separate from Gmail is even more so, so for now I stick with Gmail for everything.
Click to expand...

I used to do everything with Google as well, but their calendars have been getting harder and harder to sync with Calendars on OS X, so I switched over to iCloud a few weeks ago. The migration process was totally seamless.

I still use Google for my email and contacts, though — I sync everything with CardDAV both on OS X and iOS. Also works quite well, and obviously it's a huge advantage to have the same contacts in Gmail as in the Address Book on my phone and two computers.

I guess my needs are different, but I don't have any real need to have my calendars tied closely to my email. I find the data detectors in OS X Mail and iOS tend to do a great job (especially in OS X) of letting me click on the date/time in an email and create an event that way.

I also create quite a few events by subscribing to my Facebook calendar's .ical feed and occaionally duplicating an event into my own calendar (I leave the Facebook calendar hidden otherwise because it's cluttered with a lot of events I'm not going to attend).
 
curmudgeon32 said:
Haven't had any issues myself — but then again I don't get a lot of "invites". The vast majority of events are just made by me. I share one calendar with my daughter (also on icloud) and that works really well. I would say it's a bit of a stretch to claim that they "just do not work".



I used to do everything with Google as well, but their calendars have been getting harder and harder to sync with Calendars on OS X, so I switched over to iCloud a few weeks ago. The migration process was totally seamless.

I still use Google for my email and contacts, though — I sync everything with CardDAV both on OS X and iOS. Also works quite well, and obviously it's a huge advantage to have the same contacts in Gmail as in the Address Book on my phone and two computers.

I guess my needs are different, but I don't have any real need to have my calendars tied closely to my email. I find the data detectors in OS X Mail and iOS tend to do a great job (especially in OS X) of letting me click on the date/time in an email and create an event that way.

I also create quite a few events by subscribing to my Facebook calendar's .ical feed and occaionally duplicating an event into my own calendar (I leave the Facebook calendar hidden otherwise because it's cluttered with a lot of events I'm not going to attend).
Click to expand...

Sorry, I should have clarified: if you use invites regularly for non iCloud-to-iCloud transactions, iCloud Calendars are an exercise in frustration. That particular aspect does not work.
 
I use iCloud because I'm 100% on Apple devices at this point and it works beautifully. Even if I were to get an Android or W8 device, I would still use iCloud since their servers use CalDav anyway.

Plus I am not too fond of google mining my information for their ads. Or the clunky way in which you have to set things up.
 
I just recently switched to fastmail as well. I was getting pretty sick of gmail's absurd IMAP implementation messing with mail clients, just started the fastmail trial today and I think I'm going to buy it and switch everything over. Its IMAP implementation is flawless and wonderfully standard/vanilla. It works perfectly with apple mail and every other mail app I've used with it. Its webmail interface is actually quite nice too. Currently lacks CalDAV and CardDAV but they are currently working on it and their twitter said hopefully by the end of the year.

I considered icloud, but I only have one apple device so it wouldn't make much sense for me.

I also tried outlook.com since they recently added IMAP support, but outlook.com's IMAP is even more broken in apple mail than gmail is, which is pretty hard to beat :p.
 
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iCloud has it's issues like anything tech. However, I had a droid phone and after the initial setup, contacts never synced. Google was no help, and it was horrible. Never used calendar in Google/Android but iCloud has been flawless.
 
Fontane said:
I recently switched gmail to fastmail and am very happy. Fastmail doensn't offer sync for contacts and no calendar service at all (yet).

So I'm thinking of switching my contacts and calendar from google over to icloud. Can anyone offer some insight about their experience with using icloud vs google? There are a lot of threads I've read, but many are dated to when icloud was spotty.

How about an update from someone who has used both -- which do you prefer?

Just interested in contacts and calendar for right now.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Just choose iCloud because it is way better integrated within iOS: iCloud vs. Google apps
 
The only thing keeping me on google right now is the email I receive every morning telling me my schedule for the day. I love this feature and so far I have not been able to find anything else like it. If I could find a way to do this with another service I would be gone from google.

I like outlook.com and iCloud, but that one feature has me sticking with google, even though I have lost the gmail push.
 
rhett7660 said:
The only thing keeping me on google right now is the email I receive every morning telling me my schedule for the day. I love this feature and so far I have not been able to find anything else like it. If I could find a way to do this with another service I would be gone from google.

I like outlook.com and iCloud, but that one feature has me sticking with google, even though I have lost the gmail push.
Click to expand...

Outlook.com has a Daily Agenda option for each calendar configurable at the web interface.
 
BrianBaughn said:
Outlook.com has a Daily Agenda option for each calendar configurable at the web interface.
Click to expand...

Really!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Checking this out now!!!!!!!!

Update #1: where exactly is this feature found at?

Update #2: Found it, for those who are also looking for this feature:

To add a new calendar with this option:

Go to Calendar:
Click on the Down facing arrow next to NEW
Click on Calendar in the drop down menu
Then go to notifications towards the bottom of the page
Select Get reminders for events and task and or Get daily agenda

To update a calendar you already have:

Go to calendar
Click on the gear next to your username
Click the options selection in the drop down
On the options page at the top you will see: Edit your reminder and calendar settings
Select the calendar you want to edit
Go to notifications towards the bottom of the page
Select Get reminders events and task and or Get daily agenda

Thanks for the tip!!!!!! This just might be the last thing I need to finally let go of gmail.
 
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bwat47 said:
I also tried outlook.com since they recently added IMAP support, but outlook.com's IMAP is even more broken in apple mail than gmail is, which is pretty hard to beat :p.
Click to expand...

Are you talking about on the Mac or iPhone? I've never had any issues with outlook.com on my iPhone.
 
LoveMyPens said:
Are you talking about on the Mac or iPhone? I've never had any issues with outlook.com on my iPhone.
Click to expand...

Its the outlook.com IMAP implementation that causes issues with sync'd deleted/moved emails (both Apple mail on MAC or Thunderbird). When deleting or moving inbox emails via the mail clients they still show up on the iOS device UNLESS you either quit the client mail or erase deleted mail for the outlook.com mailbox.
 
LoveMyPens said:
Are you talking about on the Mac or iPhone? I've never had any issues with outlook.com on my iPhone.
Click to expand...

it was with apple mail on osx

as whsbuss mentions above, I had issues with moving emails between folders and such with outlook's imap, just seemed to work really unreliably. Moving mail between folders or archiving mail would work sometimes, other times nothing would happen at all, and other times I'd get some random server error, it was just all over the place :/

I'm still using fastmail, and so far I've had zero IMAP issues, and i'm using it with various different clients on different platforms (eM client on my windows desktop, apple mail on my mac, aquamail on my nexus 7, stock client on my galaxy s2), very happy with it so far. I'm also using their beta CalDav service with iCal and that seems to work well so far too.
 
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I am planning on switching from Android to the Iphone 6 Plus within the next few days. I have 1000+ contacts and hundreds of calendar events that must transfer over. The fear of losing these in the transfer process is the only thing holding me back from switching to Iphone. I currently sync my calendar and contacts with Gmail on my Android. I also have an ipad which syncs my Calendar and Contacts with my Android. A few questions:

1. What is the best way to transfer over my contacts and calendar to the Iphone?

2. If I use Gmail to accomplish this, is it better to convert to Icloud Calendar and Icloud Contacts?

Thanks for any help/input!
 
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