How to give Littlebird access to your iCloud Calendar

Littlebird, like many other apps, can sync with a Google calendar but not with iCloud. This is a shame. But I’m loving Littlebird and I wanted to give it access to my calendar.

There were a few ways I tried to solve this. I’ll take you through them in case you’re having the same issue!

Firstly, I have my iCloud calendar shared to my Google calendar so that I can see all the iCloud events in my Google calendar. So I gave a Littlebird the settings to my Google calendar, but when I synced my Google calendar to Littlebird, it did not see the iCloud events. Apparently this is a hardwired issue into Google calendar that when you are subscribed to another calendar it does not pass it on.

There’s two solutions:

Sync

You can sync your iCloud calendar to your Google calendar so that your Google calendar contains an exact copy of your iCloud calendar. I’ve done this previously but it only works if you pay, or there’s very limited sinking with a free account. If you want to go down this road you could try Onecal or CalendarBridge, for $4 per month (syncs 2 calendars), or SyncGene for $12.50 per month (syncs 5 calendars). I decided not to do this.

Move

A slightly more drastic solution, I decided to move my entire calendar over to Google calendar. The Apple desktop calendar and the Apple iPhone app work pretty well from Google calendar. It’s quite a big change but it did work.

1. Log into your Google calendar from the Apple calendar app on your desktop computer, so that in step 3 you can import your events into it.
2. Export your calendar from iCloud by logging into iCloud in your browser, going to the calendar, select the little person icon next to your calendar, find the ‘link’ to the calendar and select copy, paste this link into a browser, delete webcal: and replace it with http: hit return and your browser will download an ics file of your calendar. It may automatically open into your Calendar app or it may need double clicking from your downloads folder.
3. When you open the ics file it should open in Apple Calendar app and ask you which calendar you want to import it into, select your Google calendar and all your current appointments will be imported into your Google calendar.

That’s it! Now you can operate from your Google calendar instead of your iCloud calendar, it’s pretty much the exact same experience from Apple calendar, but now other external apps will be able to read your calendar if you need them to.

Note: you will also need to change the calendar on your iPhone. To do this just go into settings then apps then calendar then calendar accounts, then select your Google account instead of your iCloud account.