I am moving a lot of my data over to my selfhosted Nextcloud, but I use GMail, so not sure how best to get Contacts into Nextcloud.
I use an iPhone (though looking to change to Android soon). Having phone numbers on Nextcloud will be great – phone numbers will survive when I change phones, or if Google has an outage or service change. But I still use GMail for email, and that means any changes I make to contacts’ phone numbers or email addresses need to propagate to both GMail and Nextcloud.
According to posts like this, I think what I need to do is set up a separate Android device, and run davdroid to sync my GMail and Nextcloud regularly. Is this the best way, as long as I am using GMail on iOS and desktop? I have an Android tablet I could set this up on, or I could spin up an Android virtual machine.
But if possible I would rather run a service on an already-running Linux VM that can perform this sync. Or maybe there is a method I’m missing? Or maybe as long as I use GMail, I deserve to rely on Google Contacts?
Seems like the real question I am asking is how to keep 2 accounts (my Nextcloud and Google Contacts) in sync. Since gmail.com can only use Google Contacts. Vdirsyncer seems to be the way.
And for anyone going down this road, I tried setting up vdirsyncer on a Debian server. Even after doing everything you’re supposed to (more vdirsyncer info on this), such as setting up the OAuth credentials and an API in the Google Developer Console, it threw a bunch of python errors at runtime.
For now I’m giving up on this and just keeping contacts on my Google account, since Google supports pictures and syncs well with my iPhone. Maybe when I switch to an Android phone I’ll revisit this.
Well, you saved me a lot of time, so thanks for that, but it’s disappointing that this isn’t easier. It would also be nice if you could set gmail to use an external address book, but I that’s neither here nor there.
