Adding iCloud Calendar To Windows Phone 7 And 8 Via Google Calendar And Sync

Update: Windows Phone 8.1: Setting Up iCloud Email, Calendars And Contacts
In November I blogged about ‘Setting Up iCloud Calendar in Windows 8 Mail App‘. This could be applied to a Windows Phone 7 or Windows Phone 8, too. But a reader of my blog, Luca, reported problems in adding iCloud calendar to his ‘Windows Live’. I checked my ‘Windows Live / Outlook.com’ account and got the same issue. I got a look into my iCloud subscription in my Google calendar, too, and tried to add my iCloud calendar, but I failed.

I got this error: “Could not fetch the url because robots.txt prevents us from crawling the url.“.

Obviously, Apple is telling web crawlers not to index my calendar. In principle, this is a good security item, but Google decided that it’s calendar importing service should obey this request. As a result I got the above mentioned error message. After googling for a while I found the website of Jason Funk: Just paste your iCloud link and push the ‘Continue’ button. Then copy the new generate link and go ahead as usual in google calendar. After that you got your iCloud calendar subscription in google calendar website. Problem solved! Thanks to Jason Funk (you’ve got the possibility to give him a donation…;-)).

But if you got a look on your Windows Phone, you cannot see the subscribed iCloud calendar. Further more, you are not able to see any subscribed calendar on your Windows Phone. That’s normal. To get these things running go to Google Sync and activate the subscribed calendars you would like to get synced with your device, e.g. your Windows Phone. After that, take your Windows Phone and:

1. Go to settings / email + accounts
2. Choose your Google account
3. Change ‘Download new content’ and save (synchronisation will start, after that you can go back to your old settings)
4. Go to your calendar settings and now you will see your subscribed iCloud calendar via Google sync

That’s it!

Taking everything into account it is possible to sync your iCloud calendar (‘read only’) via Google calendar and Google Sync with your Windows Phone 7 or 8.

Up to now I’m still looking for a solution for the ‘Windows Live / Outlook.com” issue…

Stay tuned! 😉