Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck(a)gmail.com):
From what you say, it sounds like the phones don't
actually run caldav
clients, they instead just run an http/html client that speaks to some
web app at
google.com/apple.com, and the web app once used caldav
internally?
Sadly, I'm no expert at this. (I don't even so far use smartphones.)
I suspect that it all depends on what sort of client service on the phone
you're talking about, i.e., is it one of the ones designed to work with
real iCalendar scheduling servers (w/access protocols), or is it just
a Web wrapper devoted entirely to a Web site fronting scheduling data.
Hrm, that might explain why every time I look at
"add calendars" to my
existing postfix+dovecot stack, there seems to be some missing magic
in between "caldav server is installed" and "people with phones can do
useful things with it".
I do know that, if you engage with the communities using software like
Radicale as server-side solutions, they can tell you a lot about what
works client-side and anything required to mesh the two -- perhaps the
missing glue in your (one hopes, roughtly corresponding) server stack
that's purported to make people with phones do useful things to your
server if you do the 'add calendars' step.
To know more, I'd have to do the same from-near-zero research you would,
and you have the advantage of a test platform. ;->
And, of course, the typical 'person with phone' wouldn't know jack,
about what software he/she must have installed to implement commodity
network protocols and to interpret received data. So, no point in
asking them. They'd have no clue, in the main. But, to help get around
that:
Taking a quick gander at Radicale (assuming it's feature-comparable):
Front page encouragingly says 'Works with many CalDAV and CardDAV
clients.' Well, peachy.
https://radicale.org/clients/ elaborates:
Radicale has been tested with:
Android with DAVdroid
GNOME Calendar, Contacts and Evolution
Mozilla Thunderbird with CardBook and Lightning
InfCloud, CalDavZAP and CardDavMATE
Goes on to give specific tips. Of course, this information would be
useful to _you_ only to the extent that your server stack truly has the
identical capabilities, and I haven't a clue what a postfix+dovecot
stack with 'calendars' would comprise/do, really.
I was curious about 'DAVdroid'. Looks like its successor codebase is
something called DAVx, described as 'a CalDAV/CardDAV management and
sync app for Android'. So, there ya go. But if the user wants a
contacts, calendar, or tasks app (to edit/view contacts, events, tasks
etc. on a smartphone), that's a separate need. DAVx just manages the
CalDAV/CardDAV data flow between remote content providers and the
Android API. For example, Samsung's Android devices reportely include
in the OS build something called Samsung S Planner (more recent name
'Samsung Calendar').
I followed the non-progress of scheduling software on Linux for long
years starting in 1999, when the CTO, David Sifry, of my company
Linuxcare (a now long-dead dot-com) was known for, among other things,
an alphaware set of scheduling software called OpenFlock[1] implementing
some of the IETF alphabet-soup-du-jour protocols for the purpose that
never went anywhere. (I remember these included BEEP and iTIP.) The
project soon got unceremoniously abandoned, far from finished. One of
the lessons of study that and similar debacles was that the chaotic
churn of protocols and every little device (which then included
idiosyncratic PDAs) or client software having its own quirks and needs
was a killer.
And, the thing is, I think many such projects gave up in part because
of standards churn and 'Oh, I see you just added LDAP authentication but
it doesn't work with _my_ LDAP'. And also that there wasn't agreement
about what client-side needed to do, hence no agreement on linking
protocols.
What was required was a few strongly present-in-the-market clients
all implementing the same core protocols and having the same
expectations of a server. Then, coders would have a stable target to
shoot for.
I'm guessing we're appoaching that sort of pragmatic consensus that
delivers a commodity standard. I would further guess that
https://radicale.org/clients/ might be deemed a place that goes into the
details of that commodity standard.
Hope that helps.
[1]
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als00/2000pa…