In an ongoing quest to attempt to lessen my Google dependancy, I decided to self-host my Calendar and Contacts using Baïkal.

Installing and configuring Baïkal is sufficiently documented elsewhere. This post is a 9somewhat short) account of why I’m giving up on self-hosted contacts and calendars.

Google

The problems can be summed up into these bullet points:

• It is assumed (and practically required) to use Google Play Store
• Google Play Store requires a Google Account
• Google Account means you have Mail, Calendar, and Contacts

Simply adding your google account into your phone causes Mail, Calendar and Contacts to sync. Mail you can disable, and use an alternate client, as that data is housed internally to the gmail app, and not exposed system wide for other apps to use.

Calendars and Contacts, even if you disable sync, are still “there”. Some apps might add events to the “first” calendar, without asking (which may or may not be synced to Google, and not your self-hosted calendar). Updating contacts sometimes adds those updates to the Google Contacts list. There is no apparent way to move items from one contacts/calendar account to another.

Summary

As it stands now, you can either have:

• self-hosted contacts and calendars with probably most of your data, and understand that you will miss events, and people.

• Google Contacts and Calendar with all of your data.

As much as I preferred self-hosting, it simply isn’t practically possible until you can completely remove Google Contacts/Calendars from your device, and the management apps provide the ability to move events.