Google iCal Support Stinks on Ice

Google Calendar's iCal feed support is bad...there...I've said it. The emperor has no clothes. My iCal feeds regularly take 24-36 hours to refresh. Its been this way for months. That's simply not good enough in my "change by the minute" life.

I'm not the only one saying it as witnessed by the growing unrest in their support discussions...just do a quick query for "ical refresh". Google knows its an issue as noted in this "understated" FAQ in Google's Calendar Support Pages:

"Currently, calendar feeds are automatically updated by Google Calendar every few hours. We understand that some users want to have the ability to refresh the calendars they added manually and we are exploring various ways to enable this. If the calendar you're subscribing to using Google Calendar isn't refreshed after 24 hours, please send us the calendar address and the detail of the problem so that we can investigate. "

Every few hours is tough to take. 24 hours before you think this is a problem? Really? That's laughable. Even worse, its a silent failure. There's no last updated info available. I have to go to each subscribed calendar to see if Google is accurate. If I have to do that then what's the point? And it's likely that some users don't even realize there's a problem until its too late.

Google, if you want me to take you seriously and depend on your services as the focal point for my life then this HAS to get fixed. Google centric phones with this kind of backend calendar support don't deserve the consumer's support yet either. Many Google-centric phone buyers (G1, Hero, Droid, even Palm Pre to some extent) are finding this out too late to do anything about it.