This is driving me crazy. If I add a contact into my Gmail on my Mac, within seconds it is on my iPhone. But it is not syncing from the iPhone to the Gmail address book. What am I doing wrong, or what setting do I need to change?
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Contacts: iPhone to Gmail
- Thread starter mknoebel
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How is Gmail setup on your phone? My working solution is to have Gmail as an Exchange server on the phone (I do everything this way, but contacts can be the only enabled setting too) and then there will be a new setting appear after the Exchange setup in your Mail settings on the phone called Default Account. Change this to Gmail and it will start saving the new contacts and changes on the exchange server instead of locally.
This bugged me for the longest time until I found the setting.
I have Gmail set up as an exchange.
So I looked for Default Account under contacts and there are two choices: on my iPhone and Exchange. On my iPhone was checked, so now I checked exchange.
That's not going to give me the reverse problem is it?
So I looked for Default Account under contacts and there are two choices: on my iPhone and Exchange. On my iPhone was checked, so now I checked exchange.
That's not going to give me the reverse problem is it?
Nope 🙂. Your phone was doing fine for downloading and applying changes. It just wasn't ever uploading its own changes. If you mean Address Book sync, you might notice a delay because changing something on the Mac triggers a sync right then, but it only checks for server-side changes every hour or so.
If you mean the Gmail web interface, changes from either side are instantaneous.
One note I forgot to mention. Switching this won't update any changes that were missing before you switched it. It's only from now on.
onthecouchagain
macrumors 604
Is Gmail and Address Book the only ways to back up contacts on an iPhone? Can I ever "export" a list from the phone and save it as a file on my internal and ext. HDs? ?
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iTunes backs up the address book whenever it does a backup while syncing. You can also have it sync to the local address book.
I don't think there's a way to easily to do this. What *might* work is to delete the exchange account from your phone and allow the option of deleting all data related to the account. The contacts that are left are your local ones. Enter them on your computer to be uploaded to the Exchange server. Then readd the Exchange account to your phone, choosing the Exchange server as the default account under Contacts settings.
Edit: Readd the account after deleting the contacts from your iPad that you've added to the server on your account.
Rizvi1
macrumors 6502a
glad I found this thread. I'm setting up my mom's iphone that I just handed to her. Created some contacts on the device but decided the easiest way to do this would be to create them on her gmail and let it push to her iphone. But I was wondering why the contacts weren't going back up to gmail.
I had followed the instructions here: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252
how should I have done this initially so right from the start the contacts on both her gmail and the ios device synced back to each other simultaneously?
I had followed the instructions here: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252
how should I have done this initially so right from the start the contacts on both her gmail and the ios device synced back to each other simultaneously?
Initially setup Gmail as Exchange, then change the Default Account to Gmail so the account will send new contacts to Gmail instead of just locally.