Gravitational Pull

Best way to sync Mac and Google contacts? There isn’t one

Posted on 15 November 2009

It’s kind of a disaster when your two most critical IT vendors won’t play nice. And it’s happening right now to me with Apple and Google feuding over iPhone apps. Google had an iPhone app for managing its fabulous Google Voice service but Apple nixed it (or didn’t approve it, or whatever). Now I have to maintain two completely separate and parallel sets of contact phone numbers and email addresses and I’m not happy about it.

Here’s how I got in this mess. One, I started relying on Google Voice for its amazing portable, follow-me phone number trick plus insanely great transcribed and emailed voicemails. And two, I started using an iPhone for its heady mix of iPodness, mobile telephony and Internet access on the go.

So what’s the big deal? I have a huge set of contacts (including phone numbers and email addresses) on my Mac in Apple’s Address Book program. It’s great because I can keep the listings in total sync between and betwixt  a couple of Macs (using MobileMe) and my iPhone (using iTunes). Changes made in any of those places replicate to all the other places. Sweet.

But, when I’m placing and receiving calls using Google Voice (typically at my desk  using a Mac) I have no simple way to access those phone numbers and email addresses in Apple’s Address Book program. Google Voice only works directly with Google’s online-only contacts listing (which seems to be an offshoot of Gmail). And Google Voice obviously can’t access my Address Book listings when a call comes in and it’s trying to ID the caller for me.

Then when I’m out on my iPhone, I’m not even sure where or how to find my Google contact phone numbers at all. There’s no contacts bit in the otherwise great Google Mobile app and the contacts list I can reach from within the Mail app’s Gmail section only includes email addresses, not phone numbers.

Worst of all, I now have to track changes in two places and hope I remember to keep changing contact numbers or emails updated on both platforms — a recipe for disaster.

In theory, there’s supposedly a way to sync Address Book contacts with Google’s contact list. The problem is it it stinks. When you plug an iPhone or iPod into your computer and iTunes comes up to start syncing, check out the Info tab. Under the Contacts section, you’ll see a check box letting you also sync contacts with Google. I’ve circled it in red below:

But the feature so simplistic that I’m having trouble understanding exactly how it works, which may be another of way of saying it doesn’t really work at all. It seems like if you put a check in this box, the only thing you can do is have all of your Address Book contacts synced with all of your Google Contacts (or at least all of the contacts Google lists in its “My Contacts” area). The sync doesn’t respect or even carry across any sub-groupings you’ve assigned to some contacts, even though both Address Book and Google Contacts support assigning contacts to subgroups.

And the bigger disaster comes after that first sync because Google parses some of my Mac contacts in weird ways. For example, in some Address Book contacts, I have two people listed together (say for people I want to send a holiday card). Under first name I put “Bobby & Sally” and under the last name I put “Smith.” But when these contacts got to Google the first time, Google started listing them as First name “Bobby” Middle name “& Sally” and last name “Smith.” After that, when syncing, Google always wanted to add them back into the Mac’s address book as all new (but actually duplicative) contacts. And because Address Book doesn’t support a middle name field, there’s seemingly no way out of this syncing hell.

[UPDATE: You can add custom fields to Address Book listings including middle name -- it doesn't seem to have stopped the duplication, however.].

Apple and Google need to get together and fix this mess pronto. A Google Voice App that let me access all my Google contacts’ phone numbers on my iPhone would be a big help. Dramatically improved syncing capabilities between Mac and Google contacts would be an even bigger help. How about it?