I hate it that I love you.
I have been using Google Apps for Domains for my dollmont.net mail for years. My mail, calendar, contacts–basically, my life, are all right there. It made going to Android a no-brainer. Google syncs with all of that beautifully.
Except when it doesn’t.
Living in Ho Chi Minh City means having to carry a map with you everywhere. Google Maps works surprisingly well, and I use it all the time. The one problem I’ve had is that “My Maps” on my computer doesn’t sync with Maps on Android, because Maps on Android doesn’t support syncing with accounts from Google Apps for Domains. So I started looking for a solution.
One idea is that you can add another Google account to GMail and link it to your Apps for Domains account. This works, and it’s how I got access to Google Buzz (which also doesn’t support Apps accounts). It’s a little bit of hoop-jumping because you either have two email accounts to check or you have to set up the GMail account to forward all mail to your Apps account.
Even though this setup works properly with things like Buzz, it still doesn’t work right with Maps. I was still unable to view My Maps on my Milestone. Google says that you simply need to add the GMail account under Accounts & Sync in setup, but this never worked for me.
Today, I took the radical step of factory resetting my phone and adding the GMail account as the primary account and the Apps account as the secondary. Lo and behold, My Maps now works! I can view all my saved points and, what’s even better, I can plot routes on my laptop, save them to My Maps, and view them on my phone! Wonderful!
If only I had a calendar…
It turns out that Android 2.x only supports calendar syncing to the primary account. In this case, that’s now my placeholder GMail account and not my Apps account, which is where all the calendar data is stored. Right now, I’m setting up calendar sharing between the two accounts so that the GMail account will ‘see’ the events in the Apps account, and I hope that works.
There are times when I wish their motto was “Don’t be frustrating” instead of “Don’t be evil”.
