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How to (really) change the calendar colors on your iPhone

January 23rd, 2010

The iPhone doesn’t (easily) let you change the colors of your calendar items. Couple this with the fact that there are lots of ways to setup calendar sync’ing, and it’s easy to get discouraged.

For me, my work calendar and my personal calendar both showed up as nearly the same shade of red. Fail.

Here’s how I fixed it. This only works if you have the following situation:

  • iPhone OS 3.0 or newer
  • Using Google Calendar with CalDAV (not Exchange)
  • Note: I use Exchange for my work calendar and Google for my personal calendar, and I want them both on my iPhone with different colors

Steps to change the color (this takes about 5 minutes if nothing goes wrong).

  1. Open iCal on your Mac (don’t have a Mac? Maybe Mozilla Sunbird can do this too)
  2. Subscribe to your Google Calendar (instructions to do this
  3. In the sidebar, notice your new calendar appears
  4. Right-click on the new calendar and select Get Info
  5. Now change the color to what you want
  6. Do nothing, and in a couple minutes your iPhone calendar items will have the new color

If you can’t get iCal setup, don’t fret. It does work. Double check your URL you typed to subscribe to your Google Calendar. Don’t forget the “/user” at the end. Follow Google’s instructions (see link above) very closely.

Good luck!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Code and Cruft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “How to (really) change the calendar colors on your iPhone”

  1. Nicki Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 2:16 am

    I have tried these instructions however, the colours of allocated diarys
    in my iCal on my mac don’t mirror on my iPhone.
    Can you suggest another solution?

  2. sdc Says:
    April 28th, 2010 at 4:09 pm

    Thanks! Worked great. I had been puzzling over this. It really makes a difference when viewing your calendars to see your preferred colors.

  3. Eileen Says:
    June 24th, 2010 at 3:33 pm

    Help! That worked to get my Google calendar colors on iCal but it is only syncing ONE calendar (the primary one) with my iPhone – not the eight or so I need to sync. Does this CalDAV only work with one calendar?

    Thanks for this post!

  4. Jason J. W. Williams Says:
    July 15th, 2010 at 5:05 pm

    There’s an easier way…go to calendar.google.com. Then under “My Calendars” click the drop-down for color next to the calendar and pick a new color. Will sync to your iPhone automatically.

  5. Raymond Says:
    August 12th, 2010 at 12:45 pm

    I publish calendars onto a CalDAV (iCal Server / OS X Server) via a Mac Pro and subscribe to them on my iPhone.

    Any way of changing colours then?

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