Here is a message that I just sent to my colleagues at work and thought it was appropriate here as well. This resolves the issue that I have been having this week with my Gmail data not showing up on the iPhone 6, such as contacts and calendar appointments. Hopefully it will help someone else.
Gmail for a long time has let people sync their contacts and calendars with the Gmail Exchange server. In plain speak, this mean that if you set this up on your iPhone or other mobile device, then anytime something changes in your calendar or contacts, Gmail would also update. This was good since if you lose everything suddenly you have a means of retrieving that information. I got a new iPhone 6 last Friday, which by the way has been mostly pleasant and enjoyable aside from this issue, and wanted to get all my mail, contacts and calendar appointments from my Gmail account. In short, it did not work out that way; I got most but not all of my contacts, and none of my mail or calendar appointments. I could still access messages from the Gmail app but not from the Mail app. I tried deleting the Gmail account and setting it up again, calling Apple support, and even doing a restore which erased all content and settings, and basically starting from scratch. Nothing worked. Finally, when poking around in the Gmail help system and after doing some web searches, I found what was the issue. I had enabled 2 step authentication on my Gmail account a few years ago, which meant that if I tried to log-in to my account, I would be texted a 6 digit number and asked to enter that number to verify my identity. I had forgotten about this extra security measure, but that was what was keeping me from logging into my account and getting my data. Each time I setup the Gmail account in my iPhone settings and hit next, I was told that I had the wrong password. For a while I thought it was a compatibility issue in iOS 8 with Gmail, but that was not the case. If anyone else has 2 step authentication enabled, consider reading this page from Gmail Help on how you can generate an app specific password, which is considerably longer than the 6 digit number that you get when signing into Gmail on a computer. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1173270?hl=en Going forward, I have set iCloud to be my default calendar instead of Gmail. Hopefully this will ensure that I have copies in multiple places of my contacts and appointments. I hope this helps someone, and if nothing else, prevents you from going through the frustration that I have experienced the last few days. Once I entered the custom app password on my phone, instantly all my mail, contacts and calendar appointments came back. You should have to generate and enter the custom code once per application. So the next time I will have to do this will be when I get the next phone, whenever that is. Best regards, Wayne Merritt -- Follow me on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/wcmerritt My websites: www.wayneism.com www.whitecaneday.org -- The following information is important for all members of the viphone list. All new members to the this list are moderated by default. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. The archives for this list can be searched at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
