Did you know that there’s more than one way to access your Google account email, contacts, and calendars from your iOS device? I’m here to help you choose the best way for you to get access to your Google data from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
If you navigate to the Settings app on your iOS device and tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars… and then Add Account…, you’ll be greeted with a number of options, including Gmail. If you tap Gmail and continue through the prompts (find instructions here), you’ll be able to configure access to your email, your personal calendar, and you’ll also be able to sync Notes from the Notes app on your iOS device into your Mail application on your Mac. In this configuration, you’re able to show a maximum of 1,000 recent messages in your Google account’s inbox and you’ll be able to check for messages as frequently as every 15 minutes.
Depending on your needs, there may be reason to try a different configuration. Google supports Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync protocol which Apple offers as a feature of their iOS operating system. In order to configure your iOS device, follow these instructions.. Upon configuration, you may note that your Inbox contains relatively few messages. If you navigate to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars… > Exchange Account, you can tap Mail Days to Sync. This allows you to set the duration for messages to appear in your Inbox.
Configuring your iOS device this way has some key benefits. Instead of 1,000 recent messages you can choose to have no limit at all! And, because your iOS device is using Exchange to talk to Google’s servers, mail messages are automatically pushed to your device as soon as you receive them, which is much faster than checking every 15 minutes. You will note that your list of Google contacts under the My Contacts group (viewable at Gmail.com or at Google.com/contacts) can be synced. You will also note that your calendar can be synced.
However, there is one key difference between calendar syncing using Exchange. If you navigate to m.google.com/sync on your iOS device, log in, and tap the Sync icon, you can choose your device and check off all the shared calendars you access at Google.com/calendar or via iCal delegates.
Lastly, there may be some reason to keep both account configurations on your device, with the Gmail account configured with mail and calendars off but notes on. This will give you the limitless, push email experience along with access to all your shared calendars while still allowing you to sync notes to and from your Mac and iOS devices.