Unlike my typical tutorial formats, this one will be a near copy/paste from an email I sent to a real person so that other real people can connect this to their real brain and emotions:
Dear _____,
I’m going to forewarn you that this email is dripping with anger/frustration so try to just plunder through it and even try to enjoy it if you can….
Apple/mac is nuts. I can’t put into words how much I can’t stand the company.
They do everything under the sun to make their users dumb and compliant – in fact, it’s creepy if you think about this…. I remember now (after this morning) why I full scale boycotted Apple and threw this iPod in the ‘smartphone trash pile’.
I will stop my rant here.
<insulting section about all iphone users removed>
But, back to the solution because at this point I just want to get our calendars working for the next few months, but please let me put in a plug here to strongly consider the company you are supporting and know that yes, there is a way to totally escape the Apple corporation forever. – It’s called Ubuntu. I hope your next move is far away from these guys… I leave it with you and I promise to dedicate all my free time to helping you if/when you are ready to make the move. Until then I hope I never have to turn this stupid thing on again:
Do this in this impossible-to-imagine difficult workaround solution, and I hope by God’s grace that your ‘issue’ is the same one I’m having here which has everything to do with the Fruit Co. and their ‘ways’.,,,
1. go to ‘settings’
2. go to ‘mail/contacts/calendars, etc’
3. add account
4. go to ‘other’ (because they weren’t respectful enough to give calDav and iCal a title or it’s own option space)
5. add calDAV account (*not* calendar subscription because it seems this fruit co can’t make this work without upgrading to the $10,000 phone or buying the latest fruit air laptop to go with it…??)
6. server: YOURSERVER.COM
7. user name: YOURCLOUDUSERNAME
8. password: your cloud password
9. description: your creative name for calendars
10. hit ‘next’
now here is where it gets *real lame*. It will say want to continue without SSL? Sure, no problem:
11. continue (yes, i will move forward without SSL)(why? Because fruit co is not secure so why bother with https? in fact, let’s make it *not work at all*)(let’s encrypt is legit SSL and it doesn’t want to work)
12. you will get “unable to verify account information” error. Why? No reason. Just because they want you to use their systems… but let’s overcome!
13. ‘ok’
14. advanced settings
15. change whatever port number is listed there to 80
16. make sure SSL is off (should be)
17. go back (which somehow saves these settings even though there was no indication saving was happening..?)
18. hit ‘next’
19. but it doesn’t work! cannot verify account details blah blah? why? Because for no explainable reason, the advanced settings just randomly chose its own URL for the calendar – randomly – as if somehow Fruit Corporation is supposed to know where your calendar is hosted? no problem. let’s overcome…
20. hit ‘advanced settings’
21. make sure the ‘account URL’ is set exactly to this: http://YOURSERVER.COM:80/YOURSUBDIRECTORY/remote.php/dav/principals/users/YOURUSERNAME/
22. go back
23. done (which somehow means save?)
Here is a summary of what the two screens should look like to make it more simple to make sure you ‘followed their rules’
1.
account: ON
server: YOURSERVER.COM
user name: YOURCLOUDUSERNAME
password: YOUR CLOUD PASSWORD
description: some long url probably
2. advanced settings screen
advanced settings:
use ssl: off
port: 80
account url: http://YOURSERVER.COM:80/YOURSUBDIRECTORY/remote.php/dav/principals/users/YOURCLOUDUSERNAME/
Now, you *BETTER* report back to me that this @#$#$@#$@#$@#$ is working or I’ll @#$@#$
<SMASHES FACE ON DESK>
Wayne Out There
Thanks mate it worked like a charm.
I just chose SSL on with port 443 and that works too.
sweet! glad it worked. except… i am against both ipods and iphones and I should not have posted this.
Thanks for the tutorial – but I still couldn’t make it work. Fortunately I don’t use any crappy iOS devices, but wanted to set up a shared calendar on a coworkers iPhone. Terrible these Apple products which are useless unless you use iCloud services (which aren’t compatible with non-Apple devices).
Hi
I followed your explanation, but it still will not work.
When I enter the URL like shown in step 21., the go back and hit „Save“ (Button is not called „Done“ anymore apparently) I still get „unable to verify account information“. So then I go back to Advanced Settings and the „:80“ after the „myserver.com“ has vanished 🙁
Any idea how I can keep the „:80“ from disappearing? Looks like my iPad thinks it‘s smarter than me and deletes the port number from the URL.
Thanks,
Simon
yeah i remember this is some ‘difference’ i think between the ios versions (maybe).
I fought this again recently and again overcame…
I think (if I recall correctly) you can leave the SSL on now (and maybe you have to). In this case you would likely have to change port numbers to 443… let me see if I can find some notes on this…
dang. my notes are missing but i’ll try to get screenshots of what this guy finally used and update this blog. hang in there. My recommendation is to move to Ubuntu Touch (www.ubports.com) and stop supporting Apple wherever possible. this will help more safe and open standards to grow… but i’ll still try to find these notes.
It seems the clowns at Apple have finally got their account settings in order as of IOS version 9. I am setting up an extremely lame version 5 ipod and configuring an encrypted SSL nextcloud account was relatively painless (if you disregard entering a very complex random password without being able to cut, paste or see what has been entered). SSL settings and port are now entered automatically when your server address is preceded by https://
good to know it got easier. maybe now we can get more people on NC… but then again – they own apples so yeah. Good luck with that! “Grandma uses facetime, young bucko! Works for Granny!”
Hey Wayne! i feel your Payne!
i was scouring the internet for an answer to this, first found someone who mentioned a very frustrated tutorial, and then found a tutorial so frustrated it must have been the one mentioned. i was weirdly delighted to see it was yours!
I also found an actual solution nicely summed up here:
https://central.owncloud.org/t/ios-12-calendar-ios-stock-via-caldav/15648/38
this is beyond insane and earns a nice spot near the top on my list of why to slowly, carefully walk away from Apple products.
I connected apps to CALDAV on platforms from Android to Ubuntu to Windows but Apple is the one to downright fight me over a CALDAV account!
Y HUGOHOST??
HAHA
Thanks for the link coach! You are welcome out there any time.
I always blog my frustrations. It ends up being a reference for myself and others.
Yep. I’m super glad you are walking away from the fruit company. I have more bugs, but more freedom. It’s a sacrifice worth making even though it hurts some days.