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Contact sync

Your calendar account usually keeps your contacts too. KashCal can bring those onto your phone, so the people on your server sit in your address book next to everyone else, and stay current every time the account syncs.

This works for accounts that carry contacts over CardDAV, the contacts counterpart to CalDAV, which today means iCloud and general CalDAV servers such as Nextcloud.

Turning it on​

  1. Open the account from Settings, and look under the Sync heading, just below the calendar-sync switch, for a Contacts row, described as "Sync this account's contacts to your phone." It appears only for accounts that can carry contacts.
  2. Switch it on. The first time, KashCal asks for the contacts permission it needs to write them to your phone, using Android's standard permission prompt.
  3. Grant it, and the first sync fills in the rest. You'll see a brief confirmation that contacts are syncing for that account.

The contacts land in your phone's own address book, so they show up in your Contacts app, in the dialer, and anywhere else that reads them, not only inside KashCal.

What comes across​

The mirror keeps the detail you filed a contact under, not just a name and number:

  • Names, including phonetic spellings, nicknames, and prefixes and suffixes
  • Phone numbers and email addresses, each with its label (home, work, mobile, or a custom one you named)
  • Postal addresses
  • Job title, role, and company
  • Websites, notes, and the groups a contact belongs to
  • Birthdays and anniversaries
  • Contact photos

One direction, for now​

Contact sync is a one-way, read-only mirror: it reads your server and writes to your phone, never the other way. Nothing you change in your phone's address book reaches back and edits the contacts on your account, so there's no risk of the app rewriting your server-side contacts. Two-way editing may come in a later release; read-only is the safe half to ship first.

Because the app doesn't sync contacts back, edit a synced contact on the server (or in its own app, like iCloud) and the change flows down at the next sync.

Turning it off​

Switch the Contacts row back off and KashCal removes that account's contacts from your phone as cleanly as they arrived. It tells you what happened:

  • Removed. "Device contacts for account removed."
  • Kept, because they're shared. If a second login for the same address is still syncing those contacts, KashCal leaves them in place and says so, rather than pulling them out from under the other account.
  • Check the permission. If contacts permission has since been switched off, KashCal can't confirm the removal and tells you some may remain until you grant it again.

Keeping contacts current​

Contacts refresh on the same schedule as your calendar, and a pull-to-refresh on any calendar view now picks up contacts too, so a swipe down grabs someone added on the server right away instead of waiting for the next scheduled sync.