7 ms·

Did Google just shut down Caldav support?

56 points by joedevon 13y ago

joedevon 13y ago
OK tracked down the official sunset message by Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cl... So it isn't supposed to happen until September. But lots of people are certainly seeing errors today.
- martingordon 13y ago
  I doubt iPhone CalDAV support is going away though: > Update March 15, 2013: We worked with the developers who provide 98 percent of our current CalDAV traffic to assure access to the CalDAV API, which means many popular products will not be impacted. We remain committed to supporting open protocols like CalDAV. This seems like an unrelated, isolated outage. I'm using CalDAV on my iPhone and iPad and haven't had any issues (although I don't use 2-factor authentication like a few of the commenters in the thread).
  - joedevon 13y ago
    I am using 2-factor auth as well.
c3d 13y ago
I have the same issue from France. First thing I checked was the blog post announcing the end of CalDAV, and yes, that's September. Something else is not working right. Google may be testing just how much trouble shutting down CalDAV would cause... Or they may simply have made a mistake.
jamesaguilar 13y ago
Question: how hard would it be to write a Google Calendar API proxy that serves CalDAV requests? I'm reading the spec and it seems to be only about 100 pages long. I guess the question is whether there is any economic incentive to do so.
- josteink 13y ago
  A rule of thumb is that anything which involves calendar-sync, no matter how trivial it at first seems, will get hairy, ugly and have potential for amazing bugs you could never even imagine, the second you stop thinking about it and start writing code. The amount of edge-cases is usually beyond belief.
  - joedevon 13y ago
    WORD!
    - Dru89 13y ago
      As in, all of your calendars should be managed by Microsoft Word?
      - joedevon 13y ago
        No
  - Osiris 13y ago
    My day job is writing a calendar product. I'm currently re-writing the entire product as an API. Something as simple as "Create a new event" has taken months of work (when you save an event you have to update recurrences, alarms, attendees, etc.) Our legacy code has an event save method that's a few thousand lines long. It's the one part of the code that we avoid at all costs because a seemingly minor change can break some weird edge case. We also have a CalDav module that works but also has weird edge cases when different calendars handle things in different ways. For example, you have an event that starts on a Monday, set to repeat on Wed and Fri for 10 occurrences. Do you display the Monday occurrence of the original event even though it's not in the recurrence rule? If so, does it count as one of the 10 occurrences or not? In our testing, iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook all handle this same case in completely different ways.
    - tracker1 13y ago
Derbasti 13y ago
Oh. No more open APIs from Google? A shame. That's what used to make them great. I used to be all over the Googleverse. I searched using Google, I did email and contact management in GMail, had my calendar in GCal, read my news in GReader, and IMd in Google Talk. And the great thing about these was that they used open standards and I could choose from a multitude of clients for accessin my data. And then they shut that down one by one. Now, GMail remains the only one of those services that has not been publicly deprecated. Well, I abandoned ship long ago. Nowadays, Google Hangouts and Google Maps are the only part of Google I use. Occasionally.
- mdwrigh2 13y ago
  Of the products listed, only Reader has been deprecated.
  - Derbasti 13y ago
    GCal will stop to provide CalDAV support come September (https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav) Google Reader will shut down in July (http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cle...) I thought I read that Google Talk was shutting down XMPP syndication. However, I can't find a source for that, so that might be wrong. GMail used to sync using ActiveSync, which is useful for contacts sync. It appears this has been shut down already (http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html)
yanw 13y ago
It's just a random outage. iOS won't lose CalDav support since Apple is one of them "whitelisted developers". Edit: resolved http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1366786799000&iid=f249caf1a03bac6f7ddae197b0f60c92 http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...
treahauet 13y ago
Surely they wouldn't do that.. they killed off Google Sync (ActiveSync/Exchange) for personal / free accounts, so all of those customers have to rely on either CalDAV or a specific calendar app on mobile, right?
sgloutnikov 13y ago
Ok good, it's not only me... :\ I started getting incorrect password about 5 hours ago. When I go to settings to type it in, it says "Can't login using SSL, do you want to try without SSL" to which I say no... Hopefully it is just an outage that will get fixed.
smsm42 13y ago
This might be just a coincidence but in the last month or so I've seen this: 1. Google Reader on which I relied for my daily dose of news is going the way of the dodo. 2. HN has a story of a person having his Google acct randomly shut down with no warning and no recourse (and I don't have highly-placed friends in Google so for me something like that would mean I'm screwed forever). 3. Calendar services (on which in part my workplace relies to schedule meetings) going down, and absolutely nobody knows what's going on and even where to look for updates or official reaction from Google. I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me. It'd be probably impossible to quit cold turkey but I'm starting to look into the way to minimize the impact of Google on my life (much of which is related to information services).
- stock_toaster 13y ago
  > I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me. It seems like this has been the Google narrative of late for a (possibly growing) segment of people in the tech community. However, I wonder how many outside said community share the feeling. Probably not many.
  - eCa 13y ago
    No. But those in the tech community have an unproportional influence over those on the outside. If Google loses their hold over tech people, that will spread quickly.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >No. But those in the tech community have an unproportional influence over those on the outside. Or so they like to think. Didn't work that much for Linux on the Desktop though...
      - __--__ 13y ago
        That's an awfully fine straw man you've got there. I see you knit him a sweater and everything! Until the past couple of years, most of the tech community has conceded that linux on the desktop was not ready for primetime. Hell, even now, there isn't a consensus and most would not recommend it to those on "the outside." I honestly don't know if the tech community has a non-proportional influence over those on the outside, but your statement is almost a non-sequitur.
manicdee 13y ago
Google didn't just shut down my Calendar, they shut down everything. I am travelling and trying to use Google for various services, then Google locked me out because I logged in from somewhere different to my usual location. Now they want me to verify my account using a mobile number. Except that I'm overseas and I don't have global roaming enabled (because otherwise turning on my phone will cost $2 and every text I send costs $2, and I get charged $5/MB for data). Whether the "verify your account by giving us information we've never demanded from you in the past" is related to my lock-out, or is simply a new demand they started making over the weekend I don't know. In the meantime I have to find alternatives to Google for everything.
- TillE 13y ago
  > then Google locked me out because I logged in from somewhere different to my usual location I very recently had this happen to me too, except it took them 3-4 days after I arrived at my destination to disable my account and demand a phone number. I have two-factor authentication, and I did a very thorough inspection to ensure I had no malware - nope, it's just because my location changed. Their "kill this account" algorithms really need some tweaking.
  - eitally 13y ago
    This is a really weird one. It has happened to me once, when I traveled to Thailand, but not when I've traveled to Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, China, Belgium, or anywhere else in the last couple of years. In all of those instances, I had other devices (tablet, Chromebook, laptop) at home that were still logged into sessions with the same account. It would be handy to know how they decide when to flag accounts. Facebook, too, for that matter, and Paypal, who seem to be the most draconian.
- kalleboo 13y ago
  > because otherwise turning on my phone will cost $2 What kind of insane operator charges you for turning on your phone? Receiving an SMS while roaming is usually fee. Just turn off data and don't answer any calls.
jsolson 13y ago
No. See the status page for the issue: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1366786799000&iid=f249caf1a03bac6f7ddae197b0f60c92 http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...
camus 13y ago
Free lunch is over , Google tricked you into relying on them now you are about to understand that there is no such thing as a non paying customer , even in the internet world.
- benbataille 13y ago
  It never was a free lunch. Ever noticed all these shinny advertising banners next to your email and search results ?
  - viraptor 13y ago
    Wow, I actually just realised there are (supposed to be) ads in gmail. It seems I used adblock for so long they would be ridiculously annoying if I kept it turned off.
gaelenh 13y ago
Last weekend I decided to move my non-profit email off of gmail. Running my own mail server always seemed silly or negligent (everyone I know who runs their own has had mail bounce back at me at least once). It took me the weekend to setup and secure Kolab. It's GPL, built on top of postfix, has a nice webmail client through Roundcube, and it's actively developed. The current version (3.0) doesn't have CalDav support, but it is on the roadmap for 3.1 in a couple months. Learned a lot of about anti-spam techniques while setting it up. The config file settings were a little lax for Roundcube, but all-in-all I'm happier with the setup than with Gmail. This CalDav problem was just a random outage, but how long till they make another change that users can't opt out of?

56 points by joedevon 13y ago

OK tracked down the official sunset message by Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cl... So it isn't supposed to happen until September. But lots of people are certainly seeing errors today.

martingordon 13y ago
I doubt iPhone CalDAV support is going away though: > Update March 15, 2013: We worked with the developers who provide 98 percent of our current CalDAV traffic to assure access to the CalDAV API, which means many popular products will not be impacted. We remain committed to supporting open protocols like CalDAV. This seems like an unrelated, isolated outage. I'm using CalDAV on my iPhone and iPad and haven't had any issues (although I don't use 2-factor authentication like a few of the commenters in the thread).
- joedevon 13y ago
  I am using 2-factor auth as well.

c3d 13y ago

I have the same issue from France. First thing I checked was the blog post announcing the end of CalDAV, and yes, that's September. Something else is not working right. Google may be testing just how much trouble shutting down CalDAV would cause... Or they may simply have made a mistake.

jamesaguilar 13y ago

Question: how hard would it be to write a Google Calendar API proxy that serves CalDAV requests? I'm reading the spec and it seems to be only about 100 pages long. I guess the question is whether there is any economic incentive to do so.

josteink 13y ago
A rule of thumb is that anything which involves calendar-sync, no matter how trivial it at first seems, will get hairy, ugly and have potential for amazing bugs you could never even imagine, the second you stop thinking about it and start writing code. The amount of edge-cases is usually beyond belief.
- joedevon 13y ago
  WORD!
  - Dru89 13y ago
    As in, all of your calendars should be managed by Microsoft Word?
    - joedevon 13y ago
      No
- Osiris 13y ago
  My day job is writing a calendar product. I'm currently re-writing the entire product as an API. Something as simple as "Create a new event" has taken months of work (when you save an event you have to update recurrences, alarms, attendees, etc.) Our legacy code has an event save method that's a few thousand lines long. It's the one part of the code that we avoid at all costs because a seemingly minor change can break some weird edge case. We also have a CalDav module that works but also has weird edge cases when different calendars handle things in different ways. For example, you have an event that starts on a Monday, set to repeat on Wed and Fri for 10 occurrences. Do you display the Monday occurrence of the original event even though it's not in the recurrence rule? If so, does it count as one of the 10 occurrences or not? In our testing, iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook all handle this same case in completely different ways.
  - tracker1 13y ago

Derbasti 13y ago

Oh. No more open APIs from Google? A shame. That's what used to make them great. I used to be all over the Googleverse. I searched using Google, I did email and contact management in GMail, had my calendar in GCal, read my news in GReader, and IMd in Google Talk. And the great thing about these was that they used open standards and I could choose from a multitude of clients for accessin my data. And then they shut that down one by one. Now, GMail remains the only one of those services that has not been publicly deprecated. Well, I abandoned ship long ago. Nowadays, Google Hangouts and Google Maps are the only part of Google I use. Occasionally.

mdwrigh2 13y ago
Of the products listed, only Reader has been deprecated.
- Derbasti 13y ago
  GCal will stop to provide CalDAV support come September (https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav) Google Reader will shut down in July (http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cle...) I thought I read that Google Talk was shutting down XMPP syndication. However, I can't find a source for that, so that might be wrong. GMail used to sync using ActiveSync, which is useful for contacts sync. It appears this has been shut down already (http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html)

yanw 13y ago

It's just a random outage. iOS won't lose CalDav support since Apple is one of them "whitelisted developers". Edit: resolved http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1366786799000&iid=f249caf1a03bac6f7ddae197b0f60c92 http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...

treahauet 13y ago

Surely they wouldn't do that.. they killed off Google Sync (ActiveSync/Exchange) for personal / free accounts, so all of those customers have to rely on either CalDAV or a specific calendar app on mobile, right?

sgloutnikov 13y ago

Ok good, it's not only me... :\ I started getting incorrect password about 5 hours ago. When I go to settings to type it in, it says "Can't login using SSL, do you want to try without SSL" to which I say no... Hopefully it is just an outage that will get fixed.

smsm42 13y ago

This might be just a coincidence but in the last month or so I've seen this: 1. Google Reader on which I relied for my daily dose of news is going the way of the dodo. 2. HN has a story of a person having his Google acct randomly shut down with no warning and no recourse (and I don't have highly-placed friends in Google so for me something like that would mean I'm screwed forever). 3. Calendar services (on which in part my workplace relies to schedule meetings) going down, and absolutely nobody knows what's going on and even where to look for updates or official reaction from Google. I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me. It'd be probably impossible to quit cold turkey but I'm starting to look into the way to minimize the impact of Google on my life (much of which is related to information services).

stock_toaster 13y ago
> I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me. It seems like this has been the Google narrative of late for a (possibly growing) segment of people in the tech community. However, I wonder how many outside said community share the feeling. Probably not many.
- eCa 13y ago
  No. But those in the tech community have an unproportional influence over those on the outside. If Google loses their hold over tech people, that will spread quickly.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >No. But those in the tech community have an unproportional influence over those on the outside. Or so they like to think. Didn't work that much for Linux on the Desktop though...
    - __--__ 13y ago
      That's an awfully fine straw man you've got there. I see you knit him a sweater and everything! Until the past couple of years, most of the tech community has conceded that linux on the desktop was not ready for primetime. Hell, even now, there isn't a consensus and most would not recommend it to those on "the outside." I honestly don't know if the tech community has a non-proportional influence over those on the outside, but your statement is almost a non-sequitur.

manicdee 13y ago

Google didn't just shut down my Calendar, they shut down everything. I am travelling and trying to use Google for various services, then Google locked me out because I logged in from somewhere different to my usual location. Now they want me to verify my account using a mobile number. Except that I'm overseas and I don't have global roaming enabled (because otherwise turning on my phone will cost $2 and every text I send costs $2, and I get charged $5/MB for data). Whether the "verify your account by giving us information we've never demanded from you in the past" is related to my lock-out, or is simply a new demand they started making over the weekend I don't know. In the meantime I have to find alternatives to Google for everything.

TillE 13y ago
> then Google locked me out because I logged in from somewhere different to my usual location I very recently had this happen to me too, except it took them 3-4 days after I arrived at my destination to disable my account and demand a phone number. I have two-factor authentication, and I did a very thorough inspection to ensure I had no malware - nope, it's just because my location changed. Their "kill this account" algorithms really need some tweaking.
- eitally 13y ago
  This is a really weird one. It has happened to me once, when I traveled to Thailand, but not when I've traveled to Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, China, Belgium, or anywhere else in the last couple of years. In all of those instances, I had other devices (tablet, Chromebook, laptop) at home that were still logged into sessions with the same account. It would be handy to know how they decide when to flag accounts. Facebook, too, for that matter, and Paypal, who seem to be the most draconian.
kalleboo 13y ago
> because otherwise turning on my phone will cost $2 What kind of insane operator charges you for turning on your phone? Receiving an SMS while roaming is usually fee. Just turn off data and don't answer any calls.

jsolson 13y ago

No. See the status page for the issue: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1366786799000&iid=f249caf1a03bac6f7ddae197b0f60c92 http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...

camus 13y ago

Free lunch is over , Google tricked you into relying on them now you are about to understand that there is no such thing as a non paying customer , even in the internet world.

benbataille 13y ago
It never was a free lunch. Ever noticed all these shinny advertising banners next to your email and search results ?
- viraptor 13y ago
  Wow, I actually just realised there are (supposed to be) ads in gmail. It seems I used adblock for so long they would be ridiculously annoying if I kept it turned off.

gaelenh 13y ago

Last weekend I decided to move my non-profit email off of gmail. Running my own mail server always seemed silly or negligent (everyone I know who runs their own has had mail bounce back at me at least once). It took me the weekend to setup and secure Kolab. It's GPL, built on top of postfix, has a nice webmail client through Roundcube, and it's actively developed. The current version (3.0) doesn't have CalDav support, but it is on the roadmap for 3.1 in a couple months. Learned a lot of about anti-spam techniques while setting it up. The config file settings were a little lax for Roundcube, but all-in-all I'm happier with the setup than with Gmail. This CalDav problem was just a random outage, but how long till they make another change that users can't opt out of?