[Android Apps and Games] HansBKK:
Hi Hans,

Yes the app is also compatible with Apple (also with iCloud if you need such a sync in the future). Basically their format is OK, but depending on the other clients you are using (e.g. Thunderbird or Evolution) you could have problems because they use some none standardized ways to specify details such as custom tags. But that's in general a problem if some application tries to specify details which were not foreseen by the standard.

All the other questions can mostly be addressed with a CardDAV server, e.g. Owncloud is an alternative which can be configured easily and is frequently used especially if you would find that a online web based editor would be useful. Servers are typically storing all data as is without any modifications to unknown/unsupported data fields but on the client side its typically so that only those fields can be seen/edited which are specifically supported so e.g. no custom tag can be added to a phone number and only the default ones specified at the server can be used.

BTW ContactSync supports all this situations also custom tags and preserves all details which are not supported by Android.

Regards

Annemarie

---------- Post added at 06:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:54 PM ----------

Actually Apple isn't an issue for me, I just noticed that **Google**'s "extensions" - field formats for groups, custom types etc - seem to match the way Apple also implements vCard / CardDav.

Therefore I decided to base my "personal canonical format" on Google's implementation, rather than just slavishly following the RFC specs perfectly, since it seems few mainstream vendors do that anyway.

Other (older client) apps that don't have full fidelity with all the information in my "master data store" will just be read-only "consumers" of that data; I won't use them to create / update records.

Thanks for the OwnCloud recommendation (Q5). That seems a bit "heavier" than I'd like for just serving CardDav, but I'll check out the installation process and give it a spin ASAP.

So to clarify my other Q's:

Q1 there are differences between the structures Google outputs when exporting via vCard, as opposed to when they're serving CardDAV data. I plan to choose one or the other as the basis for my "personal canonical" data templating, so my question to you is: *which of the two* would be better?

If you think it doesn't matter that's fine, obviously vCards are easier to deal with, and as I mentioned, I want my "master" data store to be a collection of vCard files, one file per record.

Q2 Can you recommend another CardDAV server that uses such a collection as its "live" data store?

I have found Marten Gadja's "Contact Editor Pro", which seems to be excellent for on-device edits, keeping full fidelity to my "personal canonical" data (Q4 - can you suggest a better editor for Android?), but it's obviously better to do bulk record creation and editing on the desktop.

Q3 Can you recommend a (Linux) desktop client (front-end to vCards or CardDav) that fully supports all those custom gContact/Apple extensions? Ideally with good sorting/ deduping/ merging capabilities as well.

If the best tool is OwnCloud's web-based client then OK I suppose, but I'd prefer something offline if possible.