About a year ago, I opened a stupid can of worms about why it is so hard to sync existing contacts on my phone to Nextcloud using the DAVx5 app:
I learned a lot. I didn’t realize that each account on Android has its own private contact storage - there’s no “central” store on the device that DAVx5 can pull from to sync. In fact, DAVx5 creates its own account with its own contact storage. Makes sense.
This left me with two ideas:
- Use an app to manually copy contacts on my phone from the desired accounts to separate DAVx5 accounts and sync all of them to Nextcloud
- Export VCF data from the various other platforms and import it into Nextcloud
Each solution is a pain, and neither provides continuous syncing beyond the initial copy or export/import. Then, it dawned on me: why not do this server-side? Android may not support CardDAV, but Google’s Contacts API does. Outlook is a different case (for which Nextcloud already developed a solution), but I’m sure other platforms have CardDAV support via their APIs. Could this integration be added to the Nextcloud Contacts server-side app and allow users to sync their Google, Yahoo, or other contacts with Nextcloud? If nothing else, it would simplify the process of moving off of Google’s evil platforms.
I thought I’d start a discussion here before opening something on GitHub. I may be able to help, and I’m a bit inspired to do so since I’m in the process of removing all things Google from my life.