

Did Google just shut down Caldav support? - joedevon
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/calendar/FFWzKatP4kA/KrDhRvBd0awJ

======
smsm42
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).

~~~
runjake
_> 1\. Google Reader on which I relied for my daily dose of news is going the
way of the dodo._

Yes, we know. This is brought up on any given technical forum a dozen times a
day. You're beating a dead horse at this point.

The years of neglect and the nerfing of Reader during the Google+ launch gave
you plenty of forewarning.

 _> 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_

Go to Google or DDG. Type "google status" and hit enter. Click the very first
result.

~~~
smsm42
That page shows 20-minute problems that affected "0.634% of the Google
Calendar user base", which were able to access Calendar, but saw some error
messages. For me, I could not access the calendar for hours yesterday.

------
manicdee
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
> 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
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.

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

~~~
martingordon
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
I am using 2-factor auth as well.

------
Derbasti
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
Of the products listed, only Reader has been deprecated.

~~~
Derbasti
GCal will stop to provide CalDAV support come September
(<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-
cle...](http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-
cleaning.html))

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>)

------
c3d
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.

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

------
jamesaguilar
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
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.

~~~
Osiris
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
I don't blame you.. I had to work on an access request system, and the
SLA/Scheduling bits were nightmarish with huge swaths of hard to follow
code... I finally got so frustrated I spent a 15 hour straight period pretty
much ripping out the majority of said logic and had it all in UTC from front
to back, and had any "local" conversions client-side... there was still a
bunch of code in place to handle weekends, and holidays (which don't count
against SLA), but this really wasn't timezone dependant so much.

Can't imagine what a pain a full on calendar project would be.. I looked at
CalDAV at one point, because I wanted something that ran outside of Apple's OS
early on, but pretty much dropped the idea less than a week into it.

------
gaelenh
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?

------
sgloutnikov
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.

------
treahauet
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?

------
yanw
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=13...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1366786799000&iid=f249caf1a03bac6f7ddae197b0f60c92)

------
camus
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
It never was a free lunch. Ever noticed all these shinny advertising banners
next to your email and search results ?

~~~
viraptor
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.

