iOS - Google syncing contacts in a non-Exchange world

With Google shutting down its exchange services this month, I'm migrating my iOS devices that are currently using their exchange sync to the stock gmail connection for calendar/email and CardDAV for contacts. Specifically for CardDAV, everything I read out there says that the sync should be almost instantaneous but to me it looks like its clearly requiring a refresh of my ios device contacts for changes to go through. Its a minor nuisance, but having never had to refresh anything to do with mail/calendars/contacts before, its just an extra step I was hoping to avoid. Is there an auto-refresh i'm missing somewhere in the ios settings for contacts?

Found the answer to my question...

For anyone else that is converting from google active sync to imap/cardav on an ios device this month when google active sync shuts down, you just have to remember to select a frequency under "Fetch new data". If you are like me, because you were using active sync, you turned on Push and left the fetch on the default "Manually". That works fine for mail, but contacts and calendar would have to be manually refreshed in order to get updates.

Hope this helps at least one lost soul.

You've reminded me that I have to sort this out for my phone and my wife's. Thanks for keeping us up-to-date.

they are not turning active sync off. IF you have it you keep it, its new set ups they are not supporting.

I was under the impression that they were shutting down new connections to new devices, but that existing ones would continue to function (bullet point two). That said, I have no idea what this means:

Google wrote:

On January 4, 2013, we’ll be shutting down several less popular Google Calendar features. You’ll be unable to create new reservable times on your Calendar through Appointment slots, but existing Appointment slots will continue working for one year

.

Wowzers, triple post. First time I've done that.

Oops, double post.

Interesting... Somehow I read no new connections and as a grace period you have until the 30th to get everything migrated but that s clearly not the case. Well I migrated my iPad but my phone, which is much more important for contacts and calendars is still on exchange.

once I have to do a phone reset its going to suck to have to use imap... any suggestions to get push back?

I remember back on my original iPhone, I think exchange support was added when iOS 2 was released. Google didn't add support for quite a while, but there was some sort of 3rd party sync service that would hook into your mail, contacts, and calendars and provide an Exchange compatibility layer for use with your phone. It didn't always work perfectly, but it was better than using IMAP and completely missing out on calendars and contacts. Surely something like this will spring back up again.

Blotto The Clown wrote:

once I have to do a phone reset its going to suck to have to use imap... any suggestions to get push back?

I've switched to the Gmail app for mail notifications. It works pretty well and having native support for labels is really convenient. The only annoyance I've seen so far is that if you have multiple accounts setup, the app unread icon shows the total unread but inside the app by default you can only see the unread count for the first account. Unread counts for other accounts only show up when you switch to that account.

avggeek wrote:
Blotto The Clown wrote:

once I have to do a phone reset its going to suck to have to use imap... any suggestions to get push back?

I've switched to the Gmail app for mail notifications. It works pretty well and having native support for labels is really convenient. The only annoyance I've seen so far is that if you have multiple accounts setup, the app unread icon shows the total unread but inside the app by default you can only see the unread count for the first account. Unread counts for other accounts only show up when you switch to that account.

problem is I also use a work email address and id rather have my emails all in one central place. I might resort to sparrow despite the potential lack of updates in the future.