Friday, May 14, 2010

Sorry Nexus One phone owners: No .ics support in calendar

Calendar Review reports that Android-based calendars on the Google can't handle meeting invites sent by .ics file -- a standard way people have been inviting people to meetings and activities for many years.

The workaround for Nexus One users, of course, is to deal with the invites from a Google Web calendar...but, what a pain!

After last week's news that Android has no calendar API, it's time for me to award -2 SwampDrain points to Google and Android collectively.

I wonder if Google is simply hoping everyone adopts hCalendar. Good luck with that! Better to support the old and the new and urge people to modernize, rather than try to force the change.

I wonder if other Android-based calendars are similarly unable to read .ics files. One commenter in my post on the Droid calendar search problem noted that Android-based phone provider HTC provides its own calendar instead of the standard Android one, so maybe HTC's calendar not only provides in-calendar search, but .ics file support as well. Does anyone reading this know?

2 comments:

Ben said...

Note that ical4j (an iCalendar library) works on Android (at least it did a few months ago), so enterprising developers can create some nifty (albeit not fully integrated) iCalendar apps. :)

Andrew McMillan said...

On my Nexus One I use a Calendar Sync app which synchronises the internal calendar app with my external CalDAV calendar. It works fine for me, although there are timezone issues.

I do know there has been work on a true calendar app that supports CalDAV, but haven't seen it yet.